


A Second Life

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Relationship, Dorne, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Identity Issues, Older Man/Younger Woman, Poison, Protectiveness, Romance, Slow Burn, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-04 20:28:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12176004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: On the morning of Sansa Stark's wedding to Tyrion Lannister, she is found dead in her rooms - skin cold to the touch, heart still, breath stopped.Half a moon later, Prince Oberyn Martell returns to Sunspear with a flame-haired paramour, a northern bastard girl who goes by the name of Lyra Stone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon-divergent AU
> 
> Background: Oberyn arrives at King's Landing earlier, and without Ellaria, and the Red Wedding occurs a moon before it does in the books.
> 
> Sansa has been aged up to her late teens in this fic.

 

 

The servants at Winterfell had a game that a young Sansa Stark did not understand.

 _If you were to be born again, what would your second life be like?_ one servant would ask the other; when they were ferrying heavy jugs of beer through the corridors towards a feast of drunken louts with wandering hands, or when they passed each other by in the hallways carrying bedpans that splashed their feet, or while they froze their fingers raw washing linen, or mucked out the stables of a horse that kicked them bloody.

Sansa didn't understand then because she was blind to the hardship of their lives, and because she was young and thus any dreams she had - that of travelling to the south, marrying a handsome knight, or bearing the heirs of a noble house - were still possible for the future; she did not have to wish to start again when she had barely even begun.

But now she understands that game, because she plays it every day at King's Landing.

She thinks it as she is beaten before the court; she wakes with the same question every morning and drifts to sleep each night thinking of its answer; she murmurs it to herself in her rooms after Cersei has informed her gleefully that she is to marry Tyrion, that she is to bear the name of the house that destroyed her own.

And when Joffrey informs her of the murder of her mother and brother, she can't help but wonder – in a haze of unspeakable grief and fury at the gods who would leave her alive to bear this pain alone – whether they too played the same game in the scant few moments before their deaths.

_If I were to be born again, what would my second life be like?_

She did not ever expect to find a true solution to this question, because that would be impossible – you can never have a second life; the gods have only given you one to use as you see fit, to ruin.

But then one day, a Prince from the south approaches her, and offers her an answer.

 

*

 

Oberyn does not need a woman's eyes to show him that the Stark girl is mistreated when he sees her around court; her face pale, fingernails bitten bloody, too-thin limbs, trembling shoulders, and a wardrobe unfit for a ward of the king.

He does not need any eyes, only his ears, when he first hears her being beaten through the doors of the throne room of the Red Keep; and bursts through with his retinue; having arriven in King's Landing earlier than his raven said he would, for such is his prerogative; and asks why the king has put on this show for his arrival, why the king believes this kind of entertainment would be suitable for a prince of Dorne.

Joffrey is bemused by his entrance and his words, his mocking manner - unsure as to who is being derided by Oberyn and unsettled by the entrance of a titled newcomer to the world he believes he holds in the weak grip of his fist. The king's mouth wobbles into a smirk and he greets Oberyn and tells the traitor at his feet, the girl whose identity Oberyn does not yet know, to leave the king's presence because she has offended him with her snivelling.

Oberyn has much practise at hiding his distaste, his anger, his fury, at the deeds and words and character of others; because he wishes, like the animal of his namesake, to lull his opponent into a calm before he strikes true. But practise does not make it hurt any less, seeing this girl stagger out of the hall, arm around a single handmaiden, bruises and blood smeared across her bare back.

His fists clench in their gloves, he imagines choking this boy king, choking him to the point of brain damage and a broken throat, so that he might then get to work on slowly hurting the rest of his body while he could not speak or scream in pain.

 

After his audience, Oberyn sends the men and women of his retinue out into the keep and the city to find out things that he does not already know from spies and ravens; handsome and easygoing folk that can pickpocket a secret after only a few conversations and an offer of Arbor wine; and when they return, among many other interesting things, he learns that the girl being beaten was Sansa Stark.

Doran had heard that the Stark girl was being held prisoner at King's Landing, but not anything about her condition; neither of them would have expected the Lannisters to hurt her so openly, craven as the Lannisters were. Yet Oberyn had left Sunspear by ship a moon ago and had only received a scant few important ravens on the journey so it was likely that Doran did know by now.

What would his brother do about poor Sansa Stark, he thinks that evening, as he feasts on meagre King's Landing fare and drowns out its taste with a Dornish red he has brought with him. His brother is naturally cautious, his eyes fixed on the future, his mind full of plans that spool years and decades ahead. His brother plans to put a Targaryen heir on the throne, and the Targareyns will not forget that the Starks allied with the Usurper, that they killed their ancestors. Oberyn's brother would not allow his own sympathy for this girl, large though it would be, to threaten the position of his country and his family.

What would Ellaria do? Would she risk Dorne and her daughters? He does not have her to ask any longer because she left him, and his bed, some moons ago, after eight years of a grand love; her desire for him fading inexplicably as desire can do over time, as if it is a living thing that reaches a natural autumn, a winter, of itself and dies. He is happy to have shared her life for those years, happier still that she has given him four fine daughters. But he is also lonely, for he has gotten used to the constant companionship alongside his customary dalliances; maybe he has gotten old too, and wishes to have the same person waiting for him at home.

Still, sex is a good consolation, he thinks, as the whore between his legs works so diligently to please him. Sex, and friendship, he corrects, as Daemon enters the room and looks at the scene with fond exasperation.

"Couldn't wait a day before getting your cock sucked?" Daemon asks.

"I see no reason to wait," Oberyn says, shrugging, then peaks with a groan in the mouth of the man at his feet. "Perhaps you are just jealous? The Lannisters are quite eager for us to have our pick of the city's whores," he says, nudging the whore out towards the door, waiting for him to leave and the door to be shut, before he adds, "all the better to keep us occupied and out of mischief, wouldn't you think?"

"I don't trust any whore here not to gut me or give me the pox."

"Truthfully, the fear only heightens the pleasure, my friend."

Daemon sits down next to him on the couch and Oberyn drains his cup.

"The Stark girl," Daemon says, "what are we to do?"

"What can we do?" Oberyn says, and picks up his favourite pocket knife to twirl in his hands. "I have been told that a betrothal between her and Tyrion Lannister has been announced a few moments ago at the dinner which we were too travel-weary to attend," he says, and stabs the knife into the fine wood of the table, plucks it out and then smooths his fingertips over the thin indention it has made. "I cannot arrange a Dornish match for her now, the Lannisters would not allow themselves such a shaming."

"If we had gotten here a few days earlier–"

"They would not have freely given her claim to the north to Dorne. Not even the largest dowry would persuade Tywin to do something so stupid."

"Do you have another plan?"

"I have the beginnings of one, but I shall speak with Sansa first, try to gain her trust and friendship over the next few weeks. I shall ask her if she _wishes_ to be rescued from King's Landing, with all that may entail. It shall not be a kidnapping," he says, and stands, "Come, let us venture into the city and see what trouble we can find ourselves tonight before dawn has us in our beds."

He tugs Daemon up and kisses him on the cheek, thankful to have such a friend as he – for any Dornishman who saw the beating of a lady such as Sansa Stark would feel outraged, would express their displeasure, would think of ways in which they might help; and yet few would actually conspire to do anything about it, to risk their necks for the life of a stranger among the quicksands of the lion's den.

 

*

 

The night after her beating was interrupted by the arrival of the retinue from Dorne, Sansa cannot sleep. Shae has found her some dreamwine but it does not soothe the hurt of her back entirely, it does not rest her racing thoughts.

Sansa was not invited to dinner with the Lannisters, she never is anymore, but Cersei still made her aware of the topic of tonight's dinner conversation when she arrived at the door of her chamber to tell her that she was to married, three weeks hence, to Tyrion.

She did not think she had tears left to cry after the Red Wedding (and if she uses that term in her head, she does not have to think of the words 'mother', 'brother', 'Robb', and hear them in her own voice, hear her calling for them in vain); but tears she has shed, until her eyes are now burnt dry and her head aches.

At dawn, she leaves her room before Shae arrives to help her wake, tugging on her loosest dress and draping the threadbare shawl that she was given as a further insult by Cersei one day when the other woman said she looked cold.

There are guards she cannot pass at the entrance doors of the keep, and other guards and knights that might beat her just for fun, but she is allowed to walk in the courtyards, even venture out to the godswood which she has been unable to do for a week now for fear she might split apart at the seams at the memory of home and her lost family – and if she were to go mad, how much harder would Joffrey beat her to get the correct response, how much more vulnerable would she be.

Today she sits in her favourite courtyard of three; it has a fountain in the middle, whose waters are always cold, a walkway of thin trees where birds sometimes perch, and a worn statue of a woman, a queen who has lost her name and origin to history. It is empty of people and she lets her shoulders slouch, tips her head back to stare at the blue sky for just a moment, as if the string holding her head up has been dropped, before walking over to sit on the wide lip of the fountain. She stares into its waters, not leaning over too far lest she sees her own pitiful reflection looking back, and then slips her right hand under the surface. She holds it there, as the cool water begins to freeze the skin of her hand, as it begins to burn and go numb, and she is so busy concentrating on the sensation that she does not notice she is no longer alone.

"Good morrow, Lady Stark," a man's voice says from nearby and she gasps and pulls her hand back into her lap, then turns around to identify him.

It is the Dornish prince who arrived yesterday during her beating and she is ashamed to see him, ashamed that he knows what has been done to her.

She stands up and curtseys, "Good morrow, my prince,"

"Prince Oberyn Martell, at your service, my lady," he says, bowing.

What an odd turn of phrase to use. Does he mock her? She studies his eyes while the hand in her lap burns anew as it comes back to life.

The polite smile on his face vanishes. "My lady, your treatment-" he stops and heaves a breath, "Dorne knew, as the rest of Westeros does, that you were a prisoner in the Red Keep - this is the way of things sometimes, nobles kept confined to a different house's keep for political reasons, as your own family did to the Greyjoy boy. But it is not the way of things, it is not _right_ , to hurt such a ward. To beat them in front of court, to order your kingsguard to do this, to tear your dress from your shoulders. My lady, I hope I do not have to tell you that this is not the way things should be," he leans closer and his voice drops, "that this boy king is a monster. A villain sprung from incest, who should never have been allowed to take the throne."

He leans back again and it is Sansa's turn to pull in a large breath. She is crying, as she often is these days, but also shocked to silence at the boldness of his words, their vehemence, the anger in his eyes.

"Forgive me for not easing into our conversation with pleasantries, my lady," he says, holding out a handkerchief edged in embroidered golden suns, "but I could not bear to begin with a mummery. This is not right, my lady," he shakes his head, "It is unconscionable."

"My prince-" she begins, but her courtesies have left her too. She wipes her eyes with the fingers of her left hand, forgetting that the handkerchief is in her right.

"May I share your seat, my lady?" he asks, his voice a little softer now.

"Please do, my prince."

"I should ask you to call me Oberyn but I do not think you would, when you scarcely know me,"

"You have the right of it," she says, "my prince,"

In some other setting they might have shared a smile at her slip of words, but neither are in a smiling mood.

She fingers the fine cloth in her hands, "Whose embroidery is this?" she murmurs.

She has come to learn that she can avoid bad thoughts, for scant few moments, by focusing on the things she can feel with her hands, the quality of the floor under her feet, a pleasant sound in the distance, or a glimpse of the sky.

"One of my daughters gave it to me before I left Sunspear. I have eight daughters,"

That tugs her out of her ruminations, "Eight daughters, and no sons?"

"No sons, 'tis true. And since my daughters have five different mothers, I know I have only my own blood to blame."

"Does your brother have sons?"

"He does."

"I do not understand how some siblings seem to inherit everything the same, and others are as different as the moon and the sun." She folds the handkerchief into a tight square. "My sister and I were thus, we had many arguments when we were children."

"But you loved her still,"

"Of course." She hands the handkerchief towards him, and he takes it from her carefully, the skin of his hands feels warm against hers. "I would not want to part you from a gift from your daughter."

"You are thoughtful, my lady, and I shall follow your wishes, but my daughter Tyene would want you to have it, for she knows that she may make me many more besides. Do you embroider still, my lady?"

"I do, poorly, for sometimes my hands shake around the needle," she admits, her voice dipping as a Lannister guard walks past the entrance to the courtyard and she feels her gut tighten in fear.

 

*

 

He cannot tell this poor maiden that he wishes to rescue her until his plan is certain. A flash of a future which does not then arrive, is crueller sometimes than never having any sight, any hope, of the future at all.

Even half-beaten, starved and terrorised, her eyes swollen with crying, she is one of the most beautiful young women he has ever met. A curse of beauty, for if she had been plain then Joffrey should likely have not accepted the betrothal and she would never have travelled to King's Landing.

He takes his leave from her, his own fingers brushing across the square of cloth in his pocket on his walk back to his rooms, as if it would reveal her mind to him.

She was receptive to what he said, she did not beg him to take back his words. He is thankful for this for were she locked still in the kind of trap a mind can create to save a person's sanity - that of believing the best of their attacker and the worst of themselves, that of believing that they are only to blame for their treatment; it would take more than weeks to encourage her to be lucid enough to give her permission for him to take her away.

He has only slept a few hours, he and Daemon came back so late from carousing in whorehouses and inns, and he was woken swiftly by one of his servants who had spied the lady sitting alone in the courtyard, but he does not have time to go back to bed. He has things to do, and then the small council to sit in on. Though he will be making his excuses before long, and promising to send a different prince or noble of Dorne to take his brother's seat. He shall not linger in a place such as this, whose stones bear the blood of his dear sister and her children; the blood of many others besides.

 

*

 

She is to be fitted for her wedding dress, Cersei announces, sweeping into her room that afternoon and making her jerk and prick her thumb with her needle. It is some weeks until the wedding, and the seamstresses of the Red Keep are very swift; so Cersei means to draw the process out, to make the bruise deep and sore.

As she stands there, and submits to tugging and pinching and fabric being tightened uncomfortably in the creases of her body, her mind is with the scene earlier that day, and the singular prince who said such powerful things.

She had asked Shae about him when she had returned to her rooms to find her maid worried that she was not there. Shae said that Prince Oberyn was a rogue, an unmarried man with many mistresses and lovers of both sexes. His nickname was the Red Viper, he was proficient with many poisons and weapons, and he was often unmatched for daring.

He had admitted to her himself that he had eight bastard daughters by five different mothers, though he did not use that word to describe them. The clear lines of the lessons her mother had taught her, and her childhood beliefs, have been smudged by her time at court, and not even in her mother's memory would she go back to thinking in such strict terms. For she has learnt that princes and kings can be monsters, knights dishonourable, women false. Why should she still believe that bastards, like her half-brother Jon, are born bad. They are not at fault for their parents' adultery. Shae has also educated her in the acts that might produce a bastard, or a babe in wedlock, answering every foolish question Sansa had. Sansa does not want, anymore, to be sheltered from the knowledge of the world, because she has found that what she does not know can only hurt her further.

Prince Oberyn spoke to her of treason. Was there a danger for him in this, would her words be believed if she told someone? Perhaps. She can see no reason for him to lie, except to include her in a plot, but to what purpose would this plot be? If he is planning to hurt Joffrey then she is happy to be of use, even if it is to her later downfall. If he is not planning to hurt Joffrey, then it could only be a plot to slander her and she is already known as a traitor.

No, he must have spoken as true as his mien suggested. And she is warmed by his words, as much as her frozen heart can be warmed. To hear someone speak the truth, and say that you are being mistreated, is a powerful thing when you are surrounded by liars, and you fear that have become a liar to yourself as well.

She hopes that they might speak again, this southron prince and her, and he might tell her of his homeland, describe its wonders so that she might imagine it in her mind when she is trying to loosen her thoughts from the life around her.

The dress they are constructing about her is ugly, and Shae agrees from the look on her face. But maybe, Sansa wishes futilely, it will be the kind of ugly that takes many moons to sew, and some other more permanent tragedy might befall her before she has to share a bed with a Lannister and bear his children.

 

 *

 

He does not send a raven to his brother asking for his permission, nor his advice; he shall tell him nothing until they are in a room together back in Dorne and safe from eavesdroppers, or men who shoot ravens from the sky and break their codes.

He has his plan for Lady Stark in place now but he is waiting, and thinking on other plots.

He came here to King's Landing for revenge, to kill the man who had dishonoured and killed his sister. To kill him in an open field, face to face, after ordering him to admit what he had done. And he knows the name of that man now, though Tywin has lied that it was someone else; he has seen him, the Mountain, guarding the worthless Lannisters; he has felt his gut shudder with fury, his hands twitch towards weapons he is not allowed to wear in the throne room.

His hands may long to curve around his spear but something about this place, about the walls that still ring with his sister's screams, her unhappiness and sorrow and terror, makes his feet feel heavy and tired, as if he has walked for days through the desert. Now that revenge is in his grasp, it feels hollow, almost worthless for it cannot bring her back, or undo what happened.

This monster, he decides, does not deserve to be killed in a fair fight, yet still he shall die.

One of his retinue does not have the look of Dorne, she is blonde like his daughter Tyene, and pale; and she is a useful agent in lands where the Dornish may not go. She shall be the one to lure the monster to his death, so that Oberyn shall not be observed to be part of the act. Instead, Oberyn shall slip into the room at the last moment to demand the man name the names of the ones he has killed, to watch him die in turn, and then Oberyn shall leave the room, silent like a shadow who was never there. There shall be no reprisals from Tywin and the Lannisters; and Oberyn and his retinue, along with the Stark girl if she wishes it, shall escape from this land of shit and filth and innocent blood spilt by those who spit at the gods.

Oberyn has two small poison bottles on the table in front of him, and both of them will cause a death.

The first will be given tomorrow to the Mountain in his wine, killing him in agony, although afterwards it will look as if he has only drank too deeply and poisoned his own blood.

The second will be offered to Lady Stark, to Sansa. This poison will cause the appearance of death - the appearance of death by deadly pox in fact, with blemishes and blue lumps marring her skin - but after twelve hours and an antidote, she will come alive again, unharmed.

A body dead of the pox will be buried swiftly outside of the city walls, or carted out to be burnt on an open field. They will not linger to check her body carefully; even though the poison slows the heart and lungs and cools the flesh so that it would take many hours of careful watching to see that she still lives. Oberyn will intercept this body in its coffin in the wagon, and steal her back to life and to his ship, and they will leave for Dorne. No one can blame a prince who flees a city where the pox has been discovered.

Simple as this plan is, and daring too - but he does not believe for a moment that it will fail – the effects of this plot will last lifetimes. For once Sansa Stark dies, she shall not be able to be resurrected, and the girl must take a new name, a new identity, must begin a new life.

He will make a promise to her that he will keep her safe; a vow to bind her life to his, and to tie the lives of any children she has to the Martells and Dorne; and in return she will let the girl called Sansa Stark be killed forever.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I would love to hear what people think!
> 
> I love stories where Oberyn saves Sansa from King's Landing so I wanted to write my own version - I was interested in what the costs might be for such a rescue, and in exploring a mirror version of Sansa's time in the Eyrie in the books where she struggles with losing her identity.
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable graphic for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes) on tumblr


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

Joffrey is angry, Shae tells her, because his favourite jouster, the Mountain, has died from too much wine and a vigorous session with a whore. And sure enough, later that day the king finds Sansa in a corridor of the Red Keep, and orders one of the kingsguard to hit her across her face, splitting her lip. But he does not order them to beat her further with their swords and she feels relieved, and then sick at that relief. As if she is only a poor cowering animal, as if she is not a person at all.

Tyrion says that when they are married he will protect her from the kingsguard, but how can he do that? And can he protect her from bearing Lannister children too? Can he bring back her family, can he return her to her home and her life before all these horrors, can he raise her father from the dead?

The dress they are fitting gets tighter, more layers of fabric are added, more weight. She has the strange thought that she is being slowly entombed, that one day they will loop more golden cloth around her head and she will disappear inside of it, her voice stopped up, her limbs crushed to stillness.

 

A week and a half before her wedding, one of Prince Oberyn's servants approaches her when she is alone and hands her something that she takes and then clutches tightly in her fist. Prince Oberyn invites her to meet him in the godswood tonight at the hour of the ghost, the servant says.

When she returns to her rooms alone, she opens her fist and finds the same embroidered handkerchief he gave her before. Inside it there is a golden sun the size of a large coin pricked with rubies, and a small folded piece of paper with a drawing of a mountain upon it. She throws the paper immediately into the fire and watches it until it is only ashes, and then sits on her bed, rubbing her thumb across the sun and the sharp lumps of its rubies.

The prince wants something from her and has given her the means to destroy him, for the Mountain was Tywin's man and Tywin, she has come to learn, is the true power here in King's Landing. She should feel frightened by this overture, but grief has made her careless with her life.

That night she creeps out of her room wearing a cloak and enters the godswood for the first time since her mother and brother have died. The prince is not yet there and she has time to pray at the poor excuse of a heart tree.

 _Brother, mother, brother, father, brother, sister_.

Sansa cannot believe that Arya is still alive, tenacious though she was. And if she is alive she will be someone else, she will be hiding who she is. Jon is the last of her siblings living, and he has sworn himself to the Night's Watch and given up any claim to another life.

She took them for granted, her family, her siblings. If she were to live again–

Footsteps and fire approaches; the prince, alone, with a torch to light his way.

"My Lady Stark," he says and bows deeply.

She stands from her kneel in front of the tree and curtseys to him. "Prince Oberyn," she greets him.

"I must begin first with an apology. My men have told me that you have been mistreated because I killed the Mountain," he says, reaching out a hand slowly, brushing his thumb light as a feather above the cut on her cheek, and then taking back his hand.

Once again he states the truth baldly, states _treason_ baldly.

"You did not give the order, you did not raise their fists, my prince," she says. For she will have no one blamed for Joffrey's own decisions, not anymore. She used to blame herself - she was not pleasing enough, she was not good enough.

"I own it as my fault, and you cannot persuade me different," he says.

They fall silent. The wind brushes through the tree's leaves, a call echoes through the night up from the city, animal or human it is not clear.

"Let us sit, my lady. It is not blasphemous to sit on the root of your tree is it?"

"No, my prince," she says, and they find seats next to one another.

"You have met a rather sombre version of me, my lady," he says, and rubs his hands together in front if him. "There is something dreadful about this keep, I hear the voices of ghosts here."

"I cannot disagree," she says, "I fear I see similar ghouls stalking the corridors." She looks upwards at the tree, at somewhere beyond. "I used to dream of travelling here, when I was a child, that it would be something better than a song."

He turns his body towards her. "What have you heard of Dorne?" he asks, his eyes brightening simply at the name, the thought, of his homeland.

"That you are all heathens," she says, wryly, "that it is a land of bastards and lusts, and a desert that stretches further than the eye can see. That your clothes are made of the lightest of silks, your food so spiced it burns the tongue, and that the sand steeds run as fast as the clouds skidding across the sky."

His face breaks into a smile the more she talks, making him a different kind of handsome than his previous stern countenance. She can see too a glimpse of how he might be as a father, an echo of how her own father was with his children.

"All this is true and more," he says, "You have heard of the deserts; but you do not know about the mountains; the red earth; the bright blue of the seas, clearer than any northern waters, I wager; or the birds that flock above Sunspear, and the citadel itself - its bazaars and winding streets and colour and life."

He picks up her hand to hold. "Dornish wine warms the soul, just as the unceasing sun warms the shoulders and the heart, burnishes the skin. The Dornish are the handsomest people, my lady, the most honourable, in all of Westeros – a boast, and yet I believe it to be true. Our women are independent, they take lovers, they do not have to be maidens to marry, not even the highest born. A wife is not owned by her husband and a husband is not owned by his wife. Bastards are loved, and all children are invited to visit and play in the Water Gardens, a landscape of such loveliness, such laughter and play, where smallfolk frolic alongside princesses. The Dornish are warriors, the men and women both if they wish it - I have taught my daughters myself with the knife, the spear, the whip. I call them my Sand Snakes, these children of mine, and they are growing up far too fast. My brother, Prince Doran, rules the country fairly and honourably. People are not beaten in Dorne, servants and highborn neither, and justice, my lady, is fair as it can be, when humans are the ones making the rules."

Her breath falls from her in a sigh. He squeezes her hand and pulls his back before she can squeeze his in return. His eyes have been fixed on her throughout his speech, glinting with the firelight. She will dream of this moment for many years to come, she will take his description of Dorne and populate her daylight dreams with it.

"My lady, Sansa, I wish for you to accompany us to Dorne when we leave, I wish for you to find a home in Dorne, and this is not just a wish for I have a plan."

Her heart stutters in her chest. This is why he has called her here, she will listen.

He kneels down in front of her, and tears have already started sliding down her cheeks at only the thought that someone wishes to help her. He takes her hand again.

"In Dorne you shall be free of those who would harm you, you shall be free to love and be loved by whomever your heart desires. You will have an honoured place in my household, and you will be loved by my family, by the court, or else I will box them around their ears," he huffs and smiles weakly, smooths a thumb across the back of her hand, "You will be trained to defend yourself, with any weapon you wish, but you shall not need to defend yourself, for you will have a whole keep to do it for you. You shall have my sword, Sansa, for the rest of your life, and my coin to spend, my home as your home."

"But why, Prince Oberyn, and how?" He believes his words, this is not a mummery, but she does not understand why he would do such a thing, or how he may spirit her away from the Lannisters.

"I will save you, and take you to Dorne, should you wish, because I cannot leave another princess in the Red Keep to be abused. My conscience, my heart, cannot brook it. I give up nothing, it costs me nothing, to save you - I am a wealthy prince, of a welcoming land, to save you would only be an honour. And how? - you have heard that I am a master of poisons, my lady? I studied for a maester's ring in medicine though I never forged one." He slides his hand to lightly hold her wrist, and says, "I have a poison that lends the appearance of death to the taker, that they have been killed by an infectious pox. I also have an antidote to this poison that will bring the person back to life, unharmed. If you take this poison, your body will be discovered and then transported swiftly out of King's Landing, for fear of an epidemic, and I shall steal you, give you the antidote and take you on board my ship, from whence we leave for Dorne."

Her hips feel hollow as if she is walking atop a tall bridge; her mouth is dry.

"Yet," he continues, "a Sansa Stark who has died may not then come back to life, for it will reveal the plot and anger the Lannisters, and others, to the doom of yourself and my country. So, should you choose to follow my plan, you shall take a new name, a new identity. None but myself and my brother, and his heir Arianne, shall know of your true name, not even my children. And the retinue I have with my here shall swear on their life to hold this secret, and be watched for years to come. I trust my countrymen, my lady, but they are only people and people can be weak, can be threatened, secrets do out. It would be wise, too, for you to take the name of a northern bastard, raised in the faith perhaps, so that no one wonder at your northern accent and looks. At first, you will be introduced as my paramour, to explain your position in my household and to grant you the proper respect. But you shall not share my bed, you shall never have to lay with me. That is not the reason for this plot. As beautiful as you are, my lady, I am not constructing a grand conspiracy such as this, simply because I wish to seduce a lone woman."

He tilts his head with a smile and she smiles back, even though her mind is whirling. She has never been so pleased as to have her beauty dismissed. But then his face darkens, he breaks her gaze for just a moment, glancing at the ground, as if steeling himself.

"My lady," he says, "what I offer you will be a kind of true death, not only because you will appear dead for a time, but because you will give up everything of your life: your name, your family, your home, your parents, your legitimacy. There may come a time when you can return to the North, when it is safe for Sansa Stark to be alive once more, but I would be a cruel man to promise such a thing, to lie to you. By then, it may be ten years hence, and no one who knew you might still be living, you might not be believed for who you are. Thus this is the life I can offer you, the choice," he says.

He stands up, lets go of her hand, and begins to pace.

"I cannot save you through marriage, I cannot kidnap you while the Lannisters believe you still live, I cannot invade King's Landing with a force of men to free you. I cannot do any of these things my heart so wishes to do, because I must protect my family and my home over the life of a single noble girl from a northern house. I tell you this to show you what kind of a mercenary man I am." She sees him clench his fists. "How I am not a knight from a song who would risk everything for a maiden." His gaze pierces her, and he says, "I am not your saviour, I am your murderer, Sansa Stark."

He speaks strong words, harsh accusations, but Sansa appreciates the truth of them, the way he gives her a clear choice, without sweetening the sour draft.

She sees through him too, sees that he is a good man, an honourable man.

Sansa does not expect an army, or a marriage, or to be allowed to walk away from King's Landing unharmed. For many moons now, she has expected that she might only leave the Red Keep dead: her bones ferried to the north by a single feckless messenger or her body thrown over its walls and dashed on the rocks. So she feels a dark delight that she was right; but a pure happiness, a wonder, that she will not stay dead; that this man, this prince, shall resurrect her.

 

*

 

Oberyn tells her that she must wait and give her answer a week hence, that she must pray to her gods and to the memory of her family, and make a decision, that she may ask him any questions until then. A week is not enough time to decide, but that is all they have.

He escorts her back as far as the keep, but does not follow her. Instead, he goes to a brothel he has not visited yet and is greeted by his name at the door - news of a prince with deep pockets spreads like a runaway horse through a city like this. Some time later, he finds himself lying on his front on a bed with silk sheets worn to softness by their many visitors, supping at the cunt of one whore, with his fingers inside another.

After that, he heads for the harbour to check his ship. He stands upon it, feeling the deck beneath his feet sway with the waves, and wishes he was already at sea, that he would not have to return to the Red Keep that he avoids so assiduously.

Lastly, he goes to the sept to pray for his sister, and Sansa Stark.

Is there something perverse in him killing a princess in the Red Keep and then reviving her, as he wishes he could bring another princess, Elia, back to life? Perhaps. It is not good to lie to oneself, to ignore the reasons behind your impulses.

 

*

 

She left the godswood with an answer to the prince's question - _yes_ , she will leave with him; _yes_ , she will allow herself to be taken; _yes_ , she will kill poor Sansa Stark.

And as the week goes by, her answer does not change, no matter how many other arguments against rise up in her thoughts, often in the voices of her dead family.

Her father had done everything for the North and now she was to abandon it to its fate. But let her marriage not hold the door open for the Lannisters to claim it, she thinks, let the northern houses put up a fair fight, let not a broken maidenhead win its rule in a single night. Besides, Sansa was only a girl, even if she was the Stark heir now, she could not fight for, or hold, a country. Perhaps a part of her did not _wish_ to.

Did she feel betrayed that it was a southron son, and not one from the north, that came to her with a plot to free her? A spiteful thought to have, for she knows that the North has split the blood of half its sons in the war for her father and brother, for the Starks.

Does she blame her parents, her septa, for not preparing her for this pit of lions, for politics? How could a queen of Westeros not be trained in _politics_ since birth? Her father should have refused Joffrey, should have refused Robert.

But the thought of the end of the line of the Starks, of losing her name, of no one knowing her as a Stark, of _never_ coming home, cuts her to the bone.

It hits her at odd times, the treachery she plans against her name, and her legs bow and she staggers as if from a blow. When she is alone, she screams silently into her hands, screwing her face into a rictus of pain. She wants to slash at her arms with her nails - but someone would see - or her face - but someone would notice.

At night, tears leak silently down, a never-ending flood around her neck and the base of her head, making her shiver, her teeth chatter.

Shae notices her anguish; and so does Tyrion, who keeps telling her that he will look after her, as they walk through the gardens, asking her what he can do, a useless question; whilst Cersei is only thrilled by her pain.

 

*

 

Three days before her wedding, he meets her again in the godswood for her answer. He cannot meet her any later because the Lannisters will be guarding her carefully, lest she does something foolish closer to the day.

She is paler and more worn than the last time, half a ghoul already. And yet she is still elegant, poised, she is still very much a princess. And when she says _yes_ , she will take his poison, she will let him take her away to Dorne, he allows himself to think for the first time about what she might look like in Dornish clothes, under a southron sun.

"Will it hurt?" she asks.

"No. It will feel like a heavy weight falls through your blood, and then you will feel nothing until you are awake again."

She does not ask him if the plan will work, what happens if they bury or burn her alive. She does not ask because she trusts him, but because her hold on her will to live is gossamer. There is this plan, or nothing.

"Are you afraid?" he asks.

"Yes," she shivers, and he curves an arm around her back and tugs her towards him.

She turns and grabs onto him, hiding her face in his shoulder. He kisses her head; she feels small in the shelter of his arms, though she is tall for a woman. If Ellaria was still with him, if she were here, she would have a motherly touch for Sansa, but instead she will have to make do with his own, not quite fatherly and not the touch of a lover either.

She pulls back and sniffs away her tears.

He takes the poison bottle from his pocket, in its innocuous leather pouch, and curls her hands around it.

"Drink it the night of your wedding, after everyone else has gone to sleep. Drink it all, and I will see you, Sansa Stark, in your next life." He nods, resolute. "We shall have to come up with a new name for you, you will have the singular honour of choosing your own name," he says, wryly, because they both know that it is not an honour, and he holds her hands tighter.

She looks up at him, her blue eyes dark in the night, searching his eyes. Is she foolish to trust him, both of them must be thinking. He reaffirms his vow to protect her; her life will be tied to his forever.

"Good luck, my lady," he whispers then, and takes her face in his hands, kisses each cheek.

Then she brings out a gift for him, the golden sun he had given her, payment in kind for the executioner. He places it inside the pocket which he had taken the poison from, and watches her leave as she pauses once to look back, at the heart tree or him or both.

 

Daemon is waiting for him with a cup of wine ready poured.

"Shall we be transporting a northern treasure back to Dorne?" Daemon asks.

"We shall," he nods and his friend clasps him on the shoulder.

"A worthy paramour for a prince, a jewel stolen right from underneath their noses," Daemon says, having already imbibed heavily by the stain on his lips, and punches Oberyn's shoulder playfully.

Oberyn allows himself to soak up his friend's mirth, a jarring mood to the scene he has just left, and when Daemon punches him again, he takes his head into a headlock and rubs his knuckle over the other man's head until he yelps with pain.

They lie back on their couches and Daemon calls for food, and with the food come many of Oberyn's retinue, come laughter and drinking and music and dancing and fucking.

All this life, and yet _she_ is alone, and frightened, alone with no one to hold her.

When they reach Dorne he will show her what _living_ is, he will do everything he can to atone for being the thief who stole her life.

 

*

 

The night before her wedding the dress is waiting in her room on a hook, so thick with fabric it almost stands up on its own, it has the shape of her inside of it, like a headless girl.

"Your new life begins tomorrow, my lady, I hope that it will be a happier one," Shae says, brushing her hair.

"I hope so too."

It is cruel of her to leave Shae to discover her pox-ridden body, but Shae, the prince has warned her, is in the pockets of the Lannisters. Sansa has a dark glee at the thought of the panic that will spread through the Red Keep, that the pox will emerge here behind their thick walls and not in the city they shun below.

Shae goes to sleep, and so does the castle. Sansa lies in the mummery of sleep, and waits, her heart pounding, panicking, despite the firmness of her resolve, as if her body knows that it will soon undergo something unnatural.

What if she does not wake?

What if she does? What _will_ this second life of hers, this strange unexpected gift a prince has given her, like something from a song, be like.

It is time now. The sands of her life have run through her fingers, the water clock of her future is dry.

She takes a final deep breath, the last breath of her first life, and drinks the poison. Sansa Stark dies.

_Mother, brother, sister, brother, father, brother._

_Forgive me._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think :)
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable graphic for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes) on tumblr


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

Events proceed exactly as Oberyn has planned.

He and Daemon intercept the wagon that comes tearing out of King's Landing, distracting the man driving it, and switching the coffins at the back. Once the wagon is on its way again, off to bury or burn a coffin containing animal bones, they use the cover of a copse of trees to transfer her body from its coffin to a large jeweled chest lined with velvet.

Oberyn keeps a hand on the lid of the chest as their own carriage heads for the harbour and his ship; his body tensed as if he can quicken the horses through will alone.

He has seen the effects of the poison before, and yet it was still a shock to see her body thus. The servants in the Red Keep had covered her in a small shift of rough fabric and as he lifted her, parts of her that she would not think to show anyone but a husband were revealed to him. Yet he took no enjoyment from seeing her like that; the fake blemishes and boils of the pox marring her skin and the real marks underneath, the scars from her time at King's Landing. She had been so still, and light, in his arms.

He flexes a hand on the chest, rubs a finger across a gem that decorates its surface, as they near their destination.

The harbour is busier than usual, now that rumours of the pox have spread. While his servants carry his other belongings onto the boat, he and Daemon take sole charge of his most precious cargo, and carry it up the gangplank and through to the cabin that shall be hers, the cabin that is still decorated to Ellaria's tastes.

Daemon leaves him, to wait for his signal, and Oberyn bolts the door of the cabin from the inside.

He lifts her body out of the chest, where she has been curled up like a babe, and lays it out on the bed. He strips her of the shift and places her in a soft silken one instead, threads her arms carefully into a gown of orange silk. He arranges her hair neatly on the pillow, feeling uneasily as if he is dressing a doll, and yet not wanting her to wake up in anything but comfort.

He knocks on the door and hears Daemon call for the anchors to be hauled up. Oberyn turns around and leans against the door, folding his arms and watching the bed and the body on it. He keeps his vigil until he feels the jolt of the ship moving from its berth, until the roll of the floor increases with the swell of the waves, waiting for the knock on the door that will herald the open bay. When it comes, Daemon hits so hard he feels the force through his body against the door.

Oberyn removes the antidote that has been strapped to his person and hidden underneath his clothes, and uncorks it. A clear, unremarkable fluid. He tips it into her blue mouth, stroking down her throat so it seeps its way into her stomach.

He kneels by her bed, and waits.

Slowly, as if they are but water, the marks of pox flush away from her skin, and her colour pinkens. He fixes his eyes on her breastbone and sees it begin to flutter with a heart revived.

He leans closer as she gasps her first new breath, as her eyes flicker open, as she awakens.

"Oberyn?" she asks, her voice weak with her half-death.

"Yes, my lady," he says, reaching out a hand to hold her shoulder, as she turns to look at him.

She swallows and wets her lips. "This is not a dream?"

"No," he squeezes her shoulder, "you are safe, you are free."

She smiles, a true smile which he has not seen before on her face, and then she weeps. He bends over to hold her trembling body, lays down next to her on the bed, allowing her to curl into him and cry the painful tears of the reborn.

 

*

 

She had planned to begin a new life immediately, to wake washed clean of poor Sansa Stark, but instead her mind and body are in an upheaval far more riotous than the calm waves of the waters of the initial part of their journey.

She dreams of her family every night, in far more detail than she ever did while at King's Landing, and they are furious with her.

Her heart stutters often in her chest and races like a runaway horse; frightening her that something is wrong with it, that she came back impaired.

Her hands feel cold, and she shivers in her bed even though she piles many blankets atop herself.

Prince Oberyn seems to know before she does what is happening to her. He is the one to unfold the many blankets from their chest and place them at the foot of the bed before her first night's sleep. He offers her strong wine to warm her; and cakes that fill her trembling stomach and make her smile briefly with their sweetness. He has brought her a stack of books to occupy herself, a basket of embroidery material, and then when he sees her hands fumble on the needle, a basket of ropes instead, for her to untangle. She suggests that someone else might make a better job of untangling them, and he says that there are more than enough ropes to go around.

She feels embarrassed by his care and concern, and yet she welcomes it too, likes it. Is this what it will be like to be his paramour, or is it just that he feels responsible for her now, that he has the time to spare. It is strange to her that she is so comfortable with him already, but something about waking up and crying in his arms, has tied them together; a bond between the man who killed her and brought her back.

Her mother would have told her not to trust him. Her mother would have said that he only wanted a mistress, a lover, to use and discard; that she would throw away her honour by being taken by him. But her mother is dead.

 

On the third night on the boat – and to live upon a boat is a strange and new thing for her, the ground unsteady like that of her dreams, her future – she awakens from a nightmare and leaves her cabin to venture onto the deck. He has told her that she may go wherever she wishes on the boat, and that she may ask him or any of his retinue for anything she desires; and yet it is only the terror she feels from such a dream that gives her the courage to venture outside her cabin for the first time.

She spies the prince the moment she is out on the deck. He is standing on one side of the boat, leaning his elbows on the railing and looking out across the moonlit ocean. There is a darkness at sea that calls to mind the darkness around Winterfell, both a distance away from busy cities with their lamps and fires and torches.

He turns around before she greets him, hearing her soft footsteps.

"Your sleep is troubled, my lady?" he asks, his voice hushed.

"Yes," she says, coming to stand next to him, drawing her gown and new shawl further around her shoulders. "A nightmare," she says, the darkness of the night allowing her to be freer with her words than she might be otherwise. "I dream of my mother, she is furious with me." She bites her lip and hears a dry sob caught in her throat.

Prince Oberyn reaches over to take her hand where it is clenching the ship's railing. "I still dream of my sister, many nights, she is angry with me for not saving her, for not reaching King's Landing in time, for leaving her there to die," he says.

Sansa squeezes his hand. His eyes glitter in the darkness, the moon glancing off the contours of his face.

He looks out to the sea. "If she could speak to me now, Elia would say that she did not blame me, that she loved me and did not want me to be wracked with guilt. I know this, I know my sister, and yet the dreams remain, and so does my shame."

"I cannot imagine your grief," Sansa says. She lets go of his hands and scratches her nails gently along the varnished wood of the railing. She shakes her head. "My grief is that of thousands of years of Stark ancestors, and Tully too. It is like I have killed a whole town, a whole army, with my own small death."

He puts his warm hand on her cheek, and she allows herself to lean into it. "This is too heavy a load for one maiden," he says. "Family, lineage, honour, these are some of the most important things we have, and yet is not _life_ more important. Would not your ancestors wish you to live, escape, rather than marry into the family of their killers, marry into a family that may decide that you too are expendable soon enough."

He names one of the fears she has felt since hearing of her planned marriage to Tyrion. It was Tywin who was likely responsible for the murder of her mother and brother, and he might have planned to get rid of her too after she had given him the required number of heirs to tie Casterly Rock and Winterfell together. Could she have bore Lannister sons and then allowed them to be raised by another after her death? Would she have looked into blue Tully eyes or stroked a tiny head with black Stark hair and not then begun to plan and plot – would their births not have hurried forward her death and maybe theirs too. Is this the future the Stark ancestors would have wished for? Maybe it is, but it is not a future she could have lived with.

"You may give up your name, my lady, but you do not give up your blood or what makes you a Stark and a Tully. And your children will bear that inheritance inside of them." He sighs heavily, "It is easy for me to say thus. I know the power of family, and names." He strokes a thumb across her cheek and then drops his hand. "I would ask you to place the guilt you feel upon my shoulders, for they are broader than yours and better practiced at holding such things."

She smiles ruefully. The sail behind them snaps taut in the wind, and the boat creaks.

"Sometimes," he muses, "we believe that once we have made a decision, that we are thus resolute, and will feel no regret. But every decision holds within it a loss, another path not taken that we crane our necks back to watch the further we move away from the crossroads of our decision. This first death of yours will haunt your second life but it will become a familiar ghost, a spirit who you recognise and almost welcome, since it allows you to remember your past. You will find that the joys of your second life come to outweigh the pains of the first, I promise this."

She bites her lip. "I am worried," she says, "that the poison has worked its way into my body and will not leave." She shakes her head with fear.

He holds her shoulder firmly. "There are no lasting effects from the poison, you can be certain. It is only that your body is remembering while you try to forget and look forward - your body shivers in the fear and shock that your mind shies from; it remembers the coldness of solitude, the pains of mistreatment," he moves and presses the tips of two fingers to her breastbone. "Your heart races here, stumbles, does it not?"

She nods.

"It is still running away, even though you are standing still here on this boat, it has not learnt yet that you need not flee any longer."

Her breath is shaky, tears bleed from her eyes and she tastes them when she licks her dry lips.

"You have a strong way with words, my prince," she says.

"It is my brother who is the true wordsmith," he says. "He thinks I dwell too much in absolutes, in the world of black and white. Perhaps he is right." He shrugs. "But the things that I have learnt, the things I have seen, have made me thus. Although, 'tis true that even as a boy I was irritatingly principled about certain things, righteous in the way boys can be."

"I do not think this is only a masculine quality, for when I was a girl I knew exactly what was right and wrong. I knew well who to scorn, and why my convictions were always true. It is the only thing I might thank those who hurt me for, this loss of certainty, my awakening to the truth of things."

"I would disagree," he says, a tone of anger colouring his words, "but I do not want to take that from you - I do not want to wave aside your hard-earned lessons. I only hope that in Dorne you might rediscover some of your earlier trust and belief in people and the world."

He shifts closer as a gust of wind flaps the sail. There are sailors out here working and watching the rigging and the waters, but it feels as if she and Prince Oberyn are in a world alone. "Sansa," he says, "it is my greatest wish for you that you find happiness in Dorne."

"I cannot imagine how I would not find some measures of joy in your homeland, my prince."

He shakes his head. "I do not say this out of love of my homeland, but out of care for you. You are not my captive, your life now shall be your own. After a year or so of being presented as my paramour, so that all who live there know your importance to me, your status; you may live whatever kind of life you wish, you may wander wherever you like through my country, and I shall give you any assistance you require. Later, when the men who scheme have grown old, you can travel further too, you can wander through Westeros, Essos, even the Summer Isles."

"And what if I do not wish to travel, what if I wish to stay by your side?" she asks, for wandering holds no draw for her, she wants only a home and safety. She knows that the time Prince Oberyn spends with her now, here on this boat, is precious and that when he reaches Dorne he will have so many other responsibilities and people to concern himself with, his daughters most of all; that she will only merit a very small slice of his time; and she is nervous for it.

"You may do that too," he smiles. "I did not bring you here to abandon you, my lady, I simply do not wish you to feel your new life a cage."

"A home is not a cage," she says, "a room of your own with a door that locks is not the same as a cell with bars."

"A wise assertion," he says.

A sudden splash in the waters at their feet draws their attention. She peers down to see the shape of some animal there, sides wet and gleaming, far larger than any fish.

"A dolphin," he says, "did you not see any at King's Landing?"

"No," she says, and then gasps in surprise and delight as the animal suddenly breaches the water and spins in the air.

He laughs. "They are a preening animal," he says, "he is showing off for you."

The dolphin does it again twice, and then slips into the black waters and disappears.

 

A week into their journey the winds drop suddenly and the sea stills. The sails droop and the air aboard heats up without the breeze to cool it.

They are in the narrow sea but have not seen another boat all morning, and when Sansa appears on the deck at midday Prince Oberyn is announcing that lines will be thrown out for swimming. Sansa does not understand until she sees him strip to his breeches, tie a rope around his waist, and leap from the side of the boat into the water. She gasps when he does so, runs over to clutch at the railings and then smiles in relief when he breaks the surface of the water, huffing like a dog who has jumped in a lake. She had thought that the ship was motionless but she sees by the tautness of his rope and the soft trails of water easing past him, that they are in fact still moving slowly. Hence the lines, so that the swimmers do not get lost.

Other men and women of his retinue strip down to their shifts and breeches with the boldness of the Dornish, and take other lines to jump in too; splashing and playing and showing off with athletic twisting leaps a little like the dolphin of a few nights before.

Prince Oberyn clambers back aboard using the ladder that has been brought out, and stands on the deck, dripping water. His body is brown and muscular, the breeches clinging wetly to his form, and Sansa cannot find it in her to look away. He is so different from the pale softness of other men she has glimpsed before, his body so much more mature than that of her brothers back at Winterfell. She does not even blush at looking; perhaps the girl she is now does not blush. The thought that she might become someone utterly new in the days to come, change her personality and the attributes expected of Sansa Stark, is a strange one - both dizzying and terrifying.

"Will you come for a swim, my lady?" he asks, slicking back his hair with his hand. "Do you know how to swim?" he adds.

"I do, for there are ponds and lakes even in the north, my prince."

He smiles, pleased by her teasing. "But not a warm ocean I wager,"

"Is it warm, my prince? Yet I have seen those who come back aboard shiver." She nods towards the tremble of his limbs.

"Warmer then, forgive me," he bows sillily.

Does she want to swim; does she want to strip to her shift and tie a rope about her waist and plunge into a sea which must be as deep as a mountain is high? She finds that she does, yet is not sure where the bravery to do so comes from.

"I shall, if you shall join me," she says, hoping that she is not too bold to suggest so, too needy.

"Of course," he says, and bends over to get a rope for her.

She looks around at the sailors and the men and women who are swimming and lazing in the sun on the deck, warming their chilled bodies; drinking wine and rubbing linens over their hair to dry it; laughing and boasting. She is not one of them, she does not think she shall ever be so carefree and open. And yet, they are not watching her either. Perhaps the prince has told them not to, perhaps she is not so interesting as the people of King's Landing, who spied on her and judged her with their sneering looks, would have her believe. Perhaps a northern bastard girl, for that is who she is becoming now on this journey both towards Dorne and a new life, is unremarkable.

She removes the shawl from her shoulders and then carefully unties the loose pink gown that the prince had given her – one of a number donated by some of the women around her, for Oberyn had said with some regret that he could not have a wardrobe prepared for her in time. She is only in her shift now, her feet curling nervously on the smooth wooden boards of the deck.

Oberyn approaches and holds out the rope. "May I tie this around you?"

She nods and he moves closer. His arms are damp and chilled when they brush against her, making her shiver; and she can smell his body this close, the scent of his skin, the salt of the ocean.

"There," he says, "a knot so tight that even a kracken could not unloose it with his many arms. Now, shall you jump in the water or use the ladder?" He leads her over to the side.

"I will jump," she finds herself saying, and he puts out a hand to help her clamber up onto the railings.

She feels unsteady up there, tall and more than a little terrified at the dark waters in front of her, the notion suddenly appearing in her mind of the strange creatures that might be lurking there. She lets go of his hand and leaps before she can scare herself out of the decision.

Hitting the water is a shock, a sudden disorientation, but her body knows to kick towards the surface and she emerges with a gasp of excitement, a burst of relief, and looks up to see Oberyn's face change from concern to joy. He jumps in beside her, splashing her with the wake of his body, and then pops up an arms-length away.

She treads water, her limbs remembering even though it has been a few years since she last swam. She can feel the pull of the water against her as the ship moves; she can feel the secure tug of the rope around her waist, tying her to the boat.

"How do you like the ocean?" Oberyn says, bobbing up and down, the sun making the drops of water on his shoulders glint like spots of flame.

"It is certainly invigorating," she says, and he smiles.

"The waters of some of the beaches around Dorne are warmer than these, and clear enough to see all manner of creatures through."

"I do not know if I want to see what creatures I swim alongside," she admits.

She dips her head under the water to wet her face that was prickling dry in the sun.

"Your hair is still red even damp," he remarks, and she shifts her head so that her hair floats in front of her, between them. "A rare shade in Dorne, there will be many who are envious of you."

A kind lie, she thinks; for who of the Dornish, with their handsome looks, might be envious of a pale shadow of a girl like herself.

They return to the boat and she removes herself to her room quickly, before she can think too much about the sight she must have made, her wet shift stuck to her limbs, and dresses in another gown for the midday meal.

She does not hide away in her room to eat any more but joins the company lounging on the rugs and pillows in the shaded open part of the deck. She must learn more about Dorne, she has decided, and the people of her new home, must get used to the rhythms of their speech and what is said and not said (though it seems so far that there is little the Dornish do not openly discuss), to customs and expectations.

Oberyn waves her over when she approaches, offering her the seat beside him and filling a plate for her. They have yet to have a proper conversation about what it will mean to be his paramour, what is expected of her. She knows that she will not have to lay with him but surely pretending to be his lover will involve certain other intimacies so that everyone believes his lie. For now, she is content to sit beside him, and feel the warmth of his body, and lean closer for him to murmur observations and explanations about the conversations around them.

The winds return that night, and the ocean slips its way into her dreams; she floats and swims and is tugged onwards by a golden rope around her waist, turns on her back to stare at the stars in the sky and make wishes upon them.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think :)
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable graphic for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes) on tumblr


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

A few days before they arrive in Dorne, she finds herself standing alongside the prince on the deck of the boat at sunset, the sky the colour of fine silks and the air so thin and warm she cannot help but smile.

He holds onto the railings and leans back. "Your name," he says. "Have you thought of a name?"

"Lyra Stone," she says.

"Lyra, a pretty name," he says, his eyes a little mournful as he looks at her.

"I know no other Lyras, it shall be my name alone, without significance."

He nods. "Should you like me to still call you by your previous name when we are together, alone?"

"Yes," she says. For despite all her talk of killing Sansa Stark, she is still _she_ inside; she cannot change her name as quickly as she might die and come back to life.

"Good."

The sound of a harp begins, a woman has emerged to sit on the stern and pluck its strings.

"You will be presented as my paramour at Sunspear, to my family and household, but to keep you safe from those who might recognise you or grow curious you will have no diplomatic role. You will not be by my side at court, attend large feasts, or be presented to visiting dignitaries, and you will not have to sit in audience in the throne room. I am sorry, my lady, that you must be hidden away thus, that your life might be smaller in Dorne." he says, without looking at her.

"I am not sorry, my prince," she admits, "for I have not enjoyed my time in great halls outside of Winterfell." She fiddles with the sleeve of her dress. "I should like to be hidden away, to be safe. I have felt the eyes of the court watching me and I should not like to return to that. A quiet life is what I want."

It is the only thing she wants; now that she has had a few weeks to ponder what her second life might be like, now that her thoughts are not taken up by the impossibility of escape. What she wants is a room of her own and no one dragging her out to genuflect to a cruel boy king, no queen who hates her and tugs her this way and that, no keep full of guards who might beat her, no vultures lurking to use her name and inheritance.

The prince reaches out a hand to stroke down her arm. "A quiet life is what I can give you, although not one free of joy, I hope, and the company of my family and household."

"Does your last paramour still live in Sunspear?" she asks.

"She does not, Ellaria resides at Hellholt now with her father, but she will visit from time to time. She is the mother of four of my children and shared my bed for fifteen years."

Fifteen years! Sansa's heart sinks, she will be but a child next to Ellaria, and conspicuous for it.

"She is the kindest soul, Ellaria," he says, smiling sadly, "and you have nothing to fear from her. It was she who left me, not the other way around, and she will not be a rival to you. And as for your story," he says, leaning his elbows on the railing, "perhaps you have been a ward of the faith since birth, and grew up in a motherhouse in Gulltown but decided not to become a septa. I shall say that I met you in King's Landing - hardly a lie - where you were visiting a relative. Your childhood in the motherhouse will explain your reserve, and education."

He turns his head to look at her. "You are very beautiful, Sansa, you must know this, and courteous, elegant. Your outward appearance will mean that it does not matter if you are quiet, if you hide away from court and do not share the same flamboyance as those of Dorne," he turns back to look at the sea, "for people will think that I fell in love with your shy ways, that it was your differences from Ellaria that drew me in."

She listens carefully because she is fascinated to hear more about his last, true, paramour. She looks forward, with trepidation, to meeting Ellaria, and she is also relieved that she does not have to turn herself into some great seductress, for she would surely be found out within the hour.

"You will be provided with everything befitting your station - clothes, jewels, books, maidservants and guards, and a new seal for any letters you might send," he says. Yet both of them know that there is no one to send letters to, for Lyra Stone's only friend is the prince of Dorne.

Sansa knows that she has made herself vulnerable with her choice to go with him, that he holds power over her now, but she cannot find it in her to regret her decision. Perhaps she will in the future, but she has decided to trust him for now. Still, _why_ he has done this, why she deserves such care and concern, why he has given her the protection of being known as his paramour and not just one of his retinue, or a serving girl, is becoming more uncertain to Sansa.

In King's Landing, she had thought herself worthless and deserving of no kindness, and yet she also knew that she was _not_ worthless, that her name and blood were important to many people; so she saw the prince's overture through this light, his daring plan to steal away the heir to the North, but now that she is no one, now that she is no longer Sansa Stark, the plot does not seem to fit, like wearing a too-large gown. She hopes that she might find more clarity in Dorne, that she might be useful to the prince and his family in some small way, that she might be able to repay him.

The prince continues his speech, "You and I shall share a set of connecting rooms in the palace, and if we are ever hosted by friends of mine we might be expected to share a bed. To present you as my paramour where others can see I might hold your hand, place my arm around your shoulder, your waist. I might kiss your cheeks, your forehead. I might pull you down to sit on my lap and stroke the skin of your wrists and neck. Is this something you object to? It is not necessary, simply an easy way of showing my feelings for you to others."

Is she wanton if she likes the images his words have created, if she would like to be held thus? "I have no objections, Oberyn," she says, using that form of his name for she does not think he would like her to call him 'my prince' when they are negotiating things of this manner.

He smiles, noticing her change in address.

The harpist has settled into her playing now, and a man is beating his feet on the deck to make a rhythm; another woman twirling a dance in front of them, twisting her body inside its silks, clapping her hands together softly. Sansa is entranced.

"Do you know what happens in the bedchamber, upon the marriage bed?"

"Yes," she nods.

"And you know that men may lay with men and women with women?"

She nods again. Shae had explained this to her too.

"I am a man who lays with both men and women, a common thing in Dorne."

Now her old blush has returned to her cheeks, and her stomach heats.

"Ellaria and I used to share lovers regularly," he says, "nobles and whores alike, but we also had our own lovers separately. Would it pain you, Sansa, if I were to continue laying with others, away from the palace?"

"No," she says, shaking her head. For who is she to restrict this famed lover to a single cold bed.

He nods. "And we shall never have to lay together, I shall never touch you beyond what I have discussed, unless you ask this of me. If you want kisses, touches, then you shall have them, and this will not be a chore for me," he says, with a small huff. "And once some time has passed, and you are settled in your position at court, you may take lovers yourself, anyone you like, for however long - women or men or both, or none."

She cannot help but think that his last sentence feels hollow. Neither of them can imagine her laying with some unknown Dornish man. She is but a maiden, hiding who she is in a foreign land; a situation hardly conducive to an ease with others, to being able to share her body with someone else. Perhaps she shall be a maiden for the rest of her days, hidden away in luxurious rooms inside the palace of Dorne. She cannot decide what she feels about such a thought.

A small crowd is round the harp player now, and wine has been brought out, laughter spills into the air.

"I have given you much to think about," he says. "Should you like to ignore it all for tonight and learn some Dornish dances?"

"I would," she says, eagerly, as his warm hands take hers.

That night as they dance together; as she dances with other men and women, weaving in and out of them, touching hands and backs and arms, and being touched by others in return; her silks flying free, her feet aching with the exertion, her heart light; as she is held in his arms and stares up at him, the starry sky a backdrop to his handsome face; she thinks that she could fall in love with this man, this prince, that she has the seeds of love in her already. A foolish thing, to fall in love with your protector, your rescuer; with a man who loves, and is loved by, so many others already.

 

*

 

To see the familiar landscape of Dorne, the shapes of Sunspear's buildings, fills him with lightness and joy. It is as if he can breathe again, the stink of lion finally washed off, his sorrow banked to its usual embers.

He has the excitement of a boy when the ship puts down its anchors and throws out its lines to the harbour, a crowd of well-wishers and familiar faces there to welcome the return of the son of Sunspear.

While the gangplank is prepared, he goes to collect Sansa from her room. She smiles when she opens the cabin door to his knock, a nervous smile but he is pleased to see some excitement there too. She has been dressed by a maid in the finest dress he could procure from the women on his ship - for he had not been able to have her a wardrobe made in King's Landing for fear someone might realise who exactly it was for - with a gossamer veil covering her hair, a jewelled hairnet, and a golden girdle about her small waist. The blue silk of her dress makes her eyes look even brighter, calls attention to the veins that show through her pale skin. 

He takes her hands. "Remember," he teases, "you do not have to do anything but look at me lovingly, perhaps sigh a little, rest a hand atop your forehead." He does his best impression of a swooning maiden, the one that makes his younger daughters scream in laughter especially on those occasions where he has dressed in woman's clothes and a veil as well for their amusement while Ellaria cackled with laughter on the couch.

He hopes that his daughters might come to love Sansa, but he is prepared for them not to. She is so very different to Ellaria, in looks and manners and age, even though they share a similar kindness. Will it please his daughters that his new paramour is not a replacement for their mother, or will they scorn him for choosing what appears to be a softer, simpler girl - what appears, because both Ellaria and Sansa have the steel of survivors inside of them.

Sansa does indeed laugh at his impression, the jewelled bangles around her wrists jangling pleasantly at the movement. His mother used to wear bracelets like that, every motion of hers heralded by the click and clink of gold and gems.

"Now into the viper's den," he murmurs with a smile, and kisses her forehead.

He would usually ride his horse up from the harbour to the palace but since Sansa cannot display herself so openly, he shall share a carriage with her and sit by its window, with her next to him in the shade.

They make their way through the Threefold Gate through the Shadow City and Sunspear itself, and he nods to the people he recognises, and points out landmarks to Sansa. He is proud to show her his city, his home, pleased by all the ways it outshines King's Landing - the well-fed smallfolk, the bright colours and rich smells, the morning light glinting off mosaic domed roofs, the streets and walls buffed clean by the sands from the desert, the architecture of the palace with the imposing Sandship, Spear Tower and the Tower of the Sun.

There is more laughter here; certainly more love and lust, he thinks, as they pass a pair coupling against the wall in broad daylight who barely break apart to greet the prince before returning to their industry. Oberyn shall lay with less lovers now, out of deference to Sansa, and only ever for one night each. But the companionship of his family and friends in the palace shall make up for any deficit. 

After settling Sansa in her room next to his, with a quiet maidservant named Mellei who had begun to serve her on their journey, Oberyn strides to his brother's rooms to meet him, nodding to Hotah guarding the door.

"Should your ship not be quarantined, brother, or am I mistaken in thinking that there has lately been a deadly outbreak in King's Landing?" Doran says, the moment Oberyn enters the room.

"We were lucky to escape with our lives," Oberyn drawls.

"I hear you have also smuggled a northern jewel with you."

"Yes, I have brought with me my new paramour, Lyra Stone, who is lately of a motherhouse in Gulltown."

Doran raises his eyebrows and looks long-suffering, and wheels himself out from behind his desk covered in scrolls and parchment.

"That is the name she goes by now, the identity she will have forever more," Oberyn says.

"Forever is a long time," Doran says, tapping his fingers on his chair.

"The boy king was having her beaten in front of court, stripped and made bloody. She was to be married to a man from the family that murdered her," Oberyn hisses between his teeth.

"You looked at her and saw Elia."

"No," Oberyn says, shaking his head and crossing his arms.

"Yes. You saw that, and more. You saw a beautiful maiden and you wanted to save her, you were covetous."

"You will take that back," Oberyn says blankly, fiddling with the quills and the knife that sharpens them on his brother's desk.

Doran scoffs. "You would stab me with my quill knife? Which part of me will you puncture first?" He opens his arms.

"Always the neck, brother, you know this. You aim right for the vein." Oberyn points at the place on his own neck with the tip of the knife and then throws it lazily back down.

"She is tied to you now, forever."

"I thought forever was a long time?"

Doran rolls his eyes.

"I know," Oberyn says, moving closer and becoming more serious. "It was not a whim of a plan. I thought, I reflected, I decided. She wants a quiet life, safety, and I shall give her this."

"If Ellaria were still with you she would have stopped it."

"Ellaria? The same Ellaria who helped me free half a dozen whores over the years, and many servant girls too?"

"None of those were the heir to the northern throne. None of those were _princesses_."

"I have always been bold," he says, and shrugs. "You cannot be surprised by this."

"Have you brought me anything else?" Doran asks, and they look at each other for a weighty moment.

Oberyn brings out a small jar that he has shown only to Daemon, kept hidden from all other eyes. He places it on the table in front of his brother, the prince, and watches him peer into its murky depths.

"Is that-?"

"The tongue of Elia's murderer, which spoke her name and the names of her children before its owner was killed at my hand," he says. "I could not take another part of him because his body would have been examined. But a man like that who drinks himself to death might easily bite off his own tongue and swallow it, might he not."

Doran's head dips. Oberyn watches his stomach move in a deep breath.

"How fare your plots, brother?" Oberyn asks, after he has given him a moment to compose himself.

"What plots?" Doran says, with the same clever smile Oberyn imagines his brother had when he was younger, before Elia and Oberyn arrived to make him frown so often.

Oberyn turns on his heel, smirking, but he is stopped at the door by his brother's voice.

"I should thank her then, this Lyra Stone, for changing your plans, for bringing you back to me."

"I don't know what you mean," Oberyn says obliquely and leaves.

 

*

 

Sunspear is overwhelming, the palace is overwhelming, and she can scarcely catch her breath. The idea of being the paramour of the prince of Dorne had seemed somewhat feasible on the ship, amongst the small crowd there, but here - here where there are a dozen men and women far more handsome than she could ever be walking down each corridor; here, where the exotic luxury of her rooms makes her gape and feel like she has been transported to the world of some strange, unknown song – it feels a difficult task.

There will be a formal feast tomorrow night to celebrate Oberyn's return, a feast she will not attend because they do not want her to be conspicuous. Tonight, she will share a meal with his family, but first she must meet with Prince Doran, the man that will decide if she may stay here hidden, no matter what Oberyn might say about doing as he wishes.

She stares at herself in the mirror beforehand. More dresses have been brought to her by maids and Oberyn himself, who promises that seamstresses shall meet with her tomorrow, even though the dresses she had been given on the boat would surely suffice. This dress is a plum colour, with a deep plunge, long trumpet sleeves and silk skirts as light as air. She will not be able to wear the orange of the Martells, for it will clash with her hair, she realises. Is grey a colour they wear in Dorne, she wonders, fingering the sleeves, and trying to see herself as a stranger would. I am Lyra, she whispers to her reflection, Lyra Stone.

Oberyn enters in a new tunic of yellow and gold, with trousers of a similar colour to her dress. "You look a vision, my lady," he says, "but you are missing something." He smiles and brings out something gold from his pocket. "A gift, your first gift as my paramour," he says, as he places a golden necklace around her neck with a heavy pendant of the sun that hangs between her breasts. His fingers are delicate and careful on the clasp, and when they drop she turns around, looking at up at him, at the face that has become so familiar to her.

"Was the first gift not my life?" she asks, softly.

He gives her a look whose emotion she cannot fathom. He touches a finger briefly to the golden chain on her breastbone and then he shakes his head as if to clear his thoughts.

"My brother awaits," he says, and holds out his arm. "Courage, Sansa," he adds, "I swear to you that you meet a far kinder ruler than your last."

She curtseys deeply when she meets Prince Doran, intrigued by the all the ways he does not resemble his brother.

"My Lady Stark," he says, and the meaning of that address still guts her, "you are very welcome in Dorne."

"Thank you, my prince, I am honoured to visit Sunspear."

"To remain in Sunspear," Oberyn corrects and she looks over at him uncertainly.

"My prince," she says to Prince Doran, "if there is some way I might be useful to you–" her voice trailing off, for she can think of nothing. Although she was taught by her mother how to run a northern keep, she knows that she has no true skill that can be of use here in Dorne.

"You would wish to help me with my correspondence, perhaps? A lady like you must have a fair hand-"

"No, Doran," Oberyn interrupts, and she turns to look at him again. There are conversations being made between the brothers that she does not understand.

"Forgive me, my lady," Prince Doran says, after glancing at his brother, "I know that you have suffered great mistreatment at King's Landing, that you must be weary of politicking and diplomacy. Perhaps this is something to think of later, for now I would ask only that you rest and recuperate. You do not have to prove your worth here, or earn your keep. Oberyn has vowed to protect you, and care for you, and I honour that vow. You are welcome here, Sansa. I am pleased that Sunspear might be a happier home for you than your last."

"My prince," Sansa says, curtseying again, "thank you. Your kindness and generosity humbles me." 

She is relieved not to have to sit in his solar and read missives from Westeros, hear of plots and marriages and deaths and alliances, yet guilty too at that relief. When she woke this morning she found that she had scratched open one of her old scars on her back from her beatings and the ache of it reminds her of her time in the throne room.

"It is the kindness you deserve, my lady. And now, to dinner," he announces, and Oberyn calls a guard inside to wheel his brother's chair towards the door.

Oberyn takes her hand, and brushes his thumb along the back of it. "I told you that he was kind," he says, although she could tell even from this short audience that Prince Doran is also shrewd and hides his true strength, that the two brothers are not so different as their physical appearance had suggested.

It is a private dinner they attend but the company still feels quite large - Prince Doran and his heir, Princess Arianne; Oberyn's good friend Ser Daemon Sand; the Princess' milk brother Garin, and close friends Ser Andrey, known as Drey, and Spotted Sylva, thus named for her freckles; Prince Doran's blind seneschal Ricasso, maids and servingwomen and guards; and Oberyn's three elder daughters - Obara, Tyene, and Lady Nym – whom she has been nervous to finally meet. They are intimidatingly beautiful and self-assured, these three young women, and they look at her with the same proud baring of their father. They are wary of her, as well they might be, and she cannot help but hold Oberyn's hand tightly at the beginning of the meal as she replies to their polite questions, trying to draw strength from him.

The room is elegant and so different from the rooms of the two other keeps she has lived inside, with its tall ceiling and arched doorways, mosaicked walls and potted plants, silk furnishings, floor of myrish carpets, and dozens of scented candles and incense braziers which make her almost woozy with their scent. The same music from the boat - the harp and the drum - are being played softly but what she notices most is the flesh bared by dresses and tunics - flashes of leg and arm and chest and back. For a girl who spent her childhood surrounded by thick, boiled wool; who has no memory of seeing even her own mother's upper arms and legs; it is shocking, even after some of the Highgarden fashions in the Red Keep. A part of her had thought that the manner of their dress, and the languid ease the Dornish had with their bodies on the boat - the way both sexes draped over one another and embraced - was a divergence from how they might be at home, but the same comfort and sensuality is evident here too.

During the meal, Oberyn rests his arm on the back of her seat and she allows herself to lean back into it. At some point later, warm with the wine and the spiced food that flushes her face and chest with its heat, she realises that he has been twirling strands of her hair around his fingers at her shoulder, that the tips of his fingers are stroking her neck, although she cannot remember when he first began to do thus.

Before the sweet course is brought out, he gets up to talk to the seneschal across the room, kissing her on the top of her head as he leaves. She watches him walk over and speak with the old man, feeling as if she is in a strange dream.

Ser Daemon interrupts her dazed thoughts with a question about what she thinks of the food. He is sitting beside her now that Oberyn's daughters have left, arguing tiredness from their day.

She and Ser Daemon talk politely about the food, and she questions him about Dornish flavours and meats. She still has half her mind on Oberyn though, her eyes flicking over to watch him.

Daemon notices where she looks, for she is being quite obvious.

"I hope you shall be happy here in Dorne," he says, his voice softer.

"I believe I shall be, ser," she replies, sipping at her cup of wine.

Oberyn had told her that it was Daemon who had helped him steal her from the wagon where her body had been placed (and she tries very hard not to think of her body lying there in its coffin, vulnerable and oblivious to its possible fate) and on the journey here Daemon spoke kindly to her, brought her a shawl one night when she was out on the deck, made sure to pass the plate of lemon cakes to her at every meal once he had seen they were her favourite. But they had not yet spoken anything but pleasantries.

"You will be good for him, my lady," he says. "He has been lonely since Ellaria left him. As much as he enjoys taking many lovers, I know that he also craves a companion he might come home to."

Does Daemon know that she and the prince are not lovers, that they are not companions in truth? She will not correct him if so. Can she be a worthy companion to a man like the prince? She was raised to be a queen, even if she was not given the right tools in subjects like politics, and her mother would say that it was _he_ who was unworthy to be her companion. She had tried to be a good friend to her ladies-in-waiting at Winterfell; she had naively tried to be a friend of those at court in King's Landing; but she had not been a good friend to her sister, who she is reminded of by some of the women here, in their fierceness and courage, the guilt of which eats at her.

Oberyn has eight daughters, and many friends, countless advisors and servants and guards. What is there left for her to do? Perhaps if she watches him closely - although does she not do that already? - she might find some way that she could be of use to him. At least the other lovers shall take care of the bed sport portion of companionship, she thinks, and stifles a wry snort in her wine. Dornish wine is very strong, she has come to discover.

Oberyn notices that she is deep in her cups when he leads her back to their rooms, his arm about her waist to guide her weaving steps.

"You enjoyed meeting my family, and dinner?" he says, a warm amusement in his voice.

"Yes," she says, "but not the snake. I have never eaten snake before and I am unsure if I shall wish to again."

They enter their shared main room, the one with the large balcony that looks over the city and the couches that seem more bed than seat, and he steers her towards the door to her bedchamber.

"You liked the wine though, yes?"

She nods. He strokes her hair back from her face.

"Good, Sansa, good. I am glad you are happy." He kisses her on the forehead and wishes her good night, handing her over to the maidservant who has appeared to help her undress.

She will have a headache tomorrow, she thinks, as the room spins while she lies in her bed. She turns on her side and looks at the open window, the silk curtains flowing towards her like a ghost. The unfamiliar sounds of her new home float through and she feels a shiver that she cannot name as either nervousness or excitement. Her first life is so far away from here; she feels as if she has almost left Westeros altogether, that her room is in the tower of some palace in an unexplored land and tall enough to touch the sky, that she is some lucky princess in a song.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think!
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable graphic for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes)
> 
> also I want to say a big thank you to the amazing branwyn (whose [stories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn) you need to read if you haven't already) who helped me wrangle the future plot for this fic <3


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

It is only a moon into their stay in Sunspear when Sansa knocks on the door of his bedroom in the middle of the night, distraught with a nightmare she will not describe; about her family, he thinks, or her own mistreatment. She is twisting her hands together, and her cheeks and neck are wet with tears. He wants to embrace her but he does not know if touch might make her feel worse so he offers her wine instead, and she says a polite thank you through shuddering, fearful breaths. 

"Should you like to sleep beside me, my lady, and let me guard you from nightmares?" he asks.

She gives him a sad smile but nods and clambers up nervously onto his bed. He shifts away from the centre to the left side, giving her space. She pulls the thin sheet up to her chin and lies on her back, still, arms by her sides, in mimicry of the corpse she almost was.

He turns on his back too, rests his head on his arms and waits. She shivers a little, then lies so rigid he can feel it through the feather mattress. But eventually her body softens and she sleeps, and he allows himself to slip into dreams too.

He wakes before her the next morning and watches her slumber, curled towards him but not touching. There are tired bruises under her eyes that he wants to press his thumbs to and make disappear. Her hair has come loose from its braid and drapes her form like a blanket of soft silk, and he reaches out to finger a piece of it.

He wants to kiss her, on her soft cheek, on her pink lips; he wants to hold her to him and cover her body with his. But she is not awake to give him her consent so he does not.

Lately, he has been remembering one particular morning in King's Landing a few days after he had first approached her. A merchant had come to the Red Keep to sell songbirds, dancing birds from the Summer Isles, and other exotic pets, which the women of court had marvelled over on the balcony where they were displayed in their cages and boxes. He had passed by the scene and spotted Sansa, her hair always an easy banner to find, lingering at the edge of the crowd, and watching one of the merchant's handsome boys play with a spotted cat in his lap.

Oberyn had thought at the time that the wistfulness he saw on her face was because the cat was from the north perhaps, or that she was fond of the handsome boy. But now that he knows the way she leans into his touch when he puts an arm around her, the way she melts when he kisses her cheek, the way her body relaxes like it is a puppet whose strings have been cut when he pulls her onto his lap when they are listening to a harpist play and drinking wine in the private royal rooms with others, and the way her body trembles with a kind of desire when he brushes his fingertips across her neck - now he thinks that she was envious of the way the cat was being petted and stroked and touched, that it was a look of longing.

She had lost her family so young, and had no one in the palace to touch her beyond the occasional maidservant - who would be brusque with her, he thinks, performing the hatred of the queen and other ladies at court upon her body. She had no lady-in-waiting to share her bed, no betrothed to kiss her and give her the light caresses a maiden like her deserved, no father to hold her in the safety of his arms.

She never asks for Oberyn's touches, so he has to translate what her body tells him instead. When they are alone together her face is so open with her emotions and desires, it humbles him, makes him want to protect this maiden who still dreams, still wants, despite being mistreated by others so terribly. She basks in his embraces and seems wistful when he leaves her at night with a kiss on her cheek or forehead but she may be too shy, too proper, to ever ask for more and he wonders whether he should make the first move or if that would be taking advantage of her and her position here in Dorne.

Oberyn has visited several whores since he returned to Sunspear, venturing out after Sansa is asleep in her own bed if he thinks she will sleep through the night, or in the afternoon while she naps on a couch in the shade of the balcony. His body has been satisfied as ever by his brothel visits but it has not eased his longing for another particular girl, nor soothed the inflamed desire which has grown in him so slowly that he cannot tell when it first began. He is unfamiliar with not getting what he wants, with romantic yearning.

He watches her eyelashes flutter in sleep, her mouth make shapes of unknown words, as the noises of the waking city drift through the shuttered window.

He wants to make her happy. She smiles more now, true smiles; and she laughs too, a surprisingly deep laugh that draws admiring attention and sends heat to his loins. She eats well at dinner, sometimes taking pieces of her favourite lemon cake from his fingertips, an act that he is not ashamed of no matter how much his daughters roll their eyes. She grazes on olives and cheeses during the day, thanking the servants profusely for bringing them to her as if they had fetched a plate of gold and jewels instead. Sometimes he finds her laying on a couch in their rooms or on the balcony, her body relaxed as it never was in King's Landing, embroidering or daydreaming or reading, looking languid and soft. Yet she is shy with his daughters whenever they are around, unsure; and her body grows rigid if rooms are too busy, or if there are loud sounds she cannot find the origin of. And lately she has trouble sleeping.

Is her world too small here to make her happy or is it, he thinks but cannot quite explain, that it is still too large, that the number of people in even the royal rooms is too much for her. She had liked the boat, he thinks, had felt comforted by its small size and definite borders.

He has taken her on tours around the palace, proudly showing off his home. They visit the stables and he watches her rub the long noses of his sand steeds, and he lifts her up to ride them around the yard. He shows her the view from the top of the two towers of the palace, telling her about the childhood dare to climb their smooth outsides that he almost took, before even he had realised it would be a great folly. He has had seamstresses visit her, and his favourite jeweller too, persuading her to pick out her favourite pieces. He trails behind her as she peruses the great library, borrowing Dornish stories and histories of the south, touching the spines of the few northern books pensively. He took her out to the bazaars of Sunspear only once, before the crowds seemed to make both of them nervous for her, and they retreated behind the safety of the palace walls instead.

And when he is not meeting with advisors and diplomatic visitors, helping his brother with his correspondence, training in the training grounds, touring the stores of Sunspear, and spending long hours with his daughters; he is with Sansa, lying on couches in their rooms or sitting underneath the shade of canopies and fruit trees in the gardens and courtyards. They will watch the fish in the ponds, he will read her poetry, and she will tell him stories of her youth in Winterfell. He will stroke her wrists and her neck, hold her hands, play with the ends of her hair. And she will lie next to him, slit-eyed like a purring cat.

And yet, despite all this, her nightmares seem to be increasing, the spectre of her family and past is peeking through the happy present. So when Arianne returns from her travels and Doran says that he should let her take over some of his role at court, Oberyn finds the perfect excuse to go on a trip of his own, and whisk Sansa away from Sunspear.

 

*

 

They are going on a trip, she and Oberyn, and taking only Ser Daemon as guard and companion. He wakes her up a few hours before dawn so that their company may slip out of Sunspear before it wakes. There are four horses, one for each of them and another to hold supplies, and she feels a shivery kind of excitement when they set out into the darkness of the plains outside the city, feels the freedom of her hair blowing behind her as their horses gallop into the day.

Her legs are already sore, a pleasant reminder of the exhilaration of the journey, when they arrive at their first destination, a ruined holdfast called Shandystone. They remove their veils and cloaks and shake out the sand, hurrying to find a cool patch of ground in the shadow of an old courtyard.

Ruins in the north moulder and grow green with life. Ruins here in Dorne are sanded down, their edges smoothed and floors buried beneath shifting dunes.

"Do you think it beautiful, my lady?" Oberyn asks as he splits an orange and shares it between them.

"Yes, and sad."

"Sadness often goes hand in hand with beauty," he muses. "Come, let me show you the mosaics."

He tugs her by the hand through the arches of rooms and past fallen columns. She would not have thought that she would ever be so comfortable with touching, and being touched, by a man, but there is an ease between the two of them. She misses him when he is away from her and finds that when he is beside her she does not feel the hollow loneliness of a life without her family, that his presence warms her.

Oberyn ducks down and rubs the sand away from the floor and she sits beside him, uncaring of the sand that coats her light silk dress and loose travelling breeches.

"Do you see?" he asks.

"An elephant?" she says, tilting her head. "Have you ever seen one?"

"Yes," he nods. "I saw many strange and wonderful beasts on my travels in Essos."

He settles back against a column and she shifts next to him. The winds blow gently through the holdfast, swirling up shapes and sifting fine layers of sand.

"I saw an elephant here once too, not far from this very mosaic," he says.

"A real one?"

He nods. "I was visiting Shandystone to milk venom from the vipers when I heard an odd crying noise that sounded like a mournful ghost. It frightened me and I did not tarry, but made camp further away near a caravan that had set out from Sunspear. I asked them about the sound and they said a ghost did indeed haunt this landscape, that it came out of a nearby cave at night and killed anyone who dared sleep in the old holdfast. Naturally," he says, wryly, "I returned the next night ready to battle this ghoul. The caravan riders are a superstitious lot but they are the ones who travel through the strange dangers of the deep sand, where the path will shift and come alive to swallow them during storms, and pass by the true ghosts that haunt the dry wastelands."

She shivers despite the heat of the afternoon and he puts his arm around her. "I waited all night, standing vigil by my fire, hand on sword, as if a sword is any use against a ghost, but it was not until dawn threatened to arrive that the noise began. A high cry, a bellow, a great shuffling sound, and I hid behind a column and watched a beast appear from the night. A young elephant, abandoned and lost, far from home, and unwell."

"Did you tame it?" she asks, for that is the exact thing a man like Oberyn would do, instead of running away like a man of good sense, she thinks with a smile.

"I did but it was not difficult, it was lonely and sad, and hungry mostly. I fed it the food I had brought with me and then tied a rope about its neck and led it back to Sunspear, hoping that the healers might help it. But it had grown too thin, and it died a few weeks later. Its bones were sought after for ivory figurines but I forbade anyone from using them and had it buried underneath one of the gardens. Doran was furious when he saw the ground dug up for the burial." 

"My direwolf was buried in the lichyard of Winterfell, but I was in King's Landing by then and have never visited her grave," Sansa shares.

"Is it true what they say about direwolves and the northern people?"

"That we share a connection with them? It is true, although I had too little a time with Lady to forge a close connection. I think of my sibling's direwolves sometimes and hope that they survived when their humans did not, even though that is unlikely."

He pulls her towards him and kisses her forehead. Then a movement in the sands across the room draws their attention, a wriggle that marks the animal hiding underneath.

"I have milked the vipers here but their bites still pinch," he says, standing up and stalking over to the mound of sand. He watches the surface for a moment and then pounces, catching the hidden snake by its neck and throwing it over the low wall into the next room.

He does not even seem to be showing off, this is just the man he is, catching vipers with a single hand, taming elephants.

"Are you never afraid of their venom?" she asks, standing up and brushing the sand from her clothes.

"In my youthful travels in Essos I visited a healer who had me take small doses of different venoms to make me immune."

"And you were not afraid then?" she asks, and he shifts his eyes away from her.

"No, I was not afraid," he says.

They make camp in a small, inner room with high windows and a smooth statue that might have been the maiden once, which Oberyn dutifully brushes clean of sand and anoints with a smear of oil across its forehead.

The nights are cold here and she huddles her body next to his, breathing in the hot smell of his body as she drifts to sleep.

They set off before the sun rises across the dry lands towards the Greenblood river, shivering on their mounts until the day warms. Once there, Oberyn and Sansa wait in a grove of lemon trees while Daemon approaches the river to fill their water flagons and let the horses drink. Oberyn takes a lemon from a tree and scratches it against the bark to release its perfume. Her mouth waters but she knows that it would taste too tart to eat. She fills her stomach with lemon cakes every night now, in this indolent new life of hers in Dorne. Sometimes she fears that she must be dreaming, to have found herself in such comfort and safety even with her nightmares and sudden sadnesses. But she could not have even dreamt an escape as happy as this.

Daemon returns to them soaked to the bone, dripping on the ground.

"Were you showing off for a Greenblood woman and slipped in the river?" Oberyn mocks.

"No," Daemon gripes, "it was your horse that kicked me in." Oberyn laughs deeply and Sansa stifles a snort.

"Ah, well it is a good hot day for a bath," Oberyn says as they mount their horses again, and Daemon flicks his waterlogged cloak over to smack his friend's face, and Sansa really does laugh then at Oberyn's look of outrage.

"Oh, this is funny is it?" he teases Sansa, as they head out of the grove. "You are lucky that there are no rivers where we are headed, else you would find yourself thrown in and all your lovely silks ruined."

She smiles. The water would not ruin her clothes and besides, he would only buy her more if it did. The chests in her room at Sunspear bulge with cloth and the jewellry boxes seem to multiply day by day. She arrived on the shores of this land with nothing but her own body, for there had been nothing else placed in her poor wooden coffin. Oberyn seeks to overbalance things in the opposite direction, but he looks so mournful if she refuses his gifts that she finds herself welcoming them if only to make him smile and look so satisfied. Of course, the new girl she has become is not entirely divorced from the first, and she has always liked fine dresses and pretty things.

They trek towards the hills, stopping for a night in a grove of thin sun-bleached trees that look like bones under moonlight. Oberyn sees her uncertain looks and he has her stare up at the stars instead, he and Daemon competing as to who can name the most, the both of them making half of them up but sounding ever so convincing with the stories they conjure from the air.

They sleep under the stars and she wakes with a dry mouth to see dawn spreading its fingers across the sky and turns over to watch Oberyn, who is for once still sleeping. He looks younger in repose, but still old enough to be her father. She reaches out a finger cautiously and strokes it down his proud nose, feeling as if she is caught in a trance, and then his eyes snap open and immediately soften when he sees her, and he catches her hand and kisses it.

"You have caught the Red Viper asleep," Daemon drawls, from his seat next to their packs where he brings out hard bread and cheese for them. "You are a dangerous woman."

"It was a feigned sleep," Oberyn argues.

"Was he drooling, snoring?" Daemon questions her, and Oberyn scoffs.

"The Red Viper would not deign to snore," she says.

"Thank you, my lady," Oberyn says, with a little bow. "It is well that one of you shows me the proper respect."

"Respect, pah!" says Daemon. "I could tell you such stories about this man," he says to her, pointing at Oberyn with the end of the knife he uses to cut a lemon for his water.

"I should love to hear stories about the prince," she says, eagerly, and Oberyn groans beside her.

Daemon tells her about Oberyn as a boy as they make their way up to the hills, his mischievousness and youthful folly, his daring acts of valour and the kisses he stole from half the population of the keep.

She would not have known what to do with this bold boy, she thinks, and is glad that she has met an older, somewhat calmer, version.

They climb the hill slowly, stopping to rest and eat in the shade of outcrops. The air gets cooler the higher they get but the sun brighter, and half an hour from the top the path is too rough for horses so Daemon stays with their mounts and Oberyn leads her onwards.

The view from the top when they reach it is extraordinary, they can see across the dry lands towards the thin line of the river beyond, and behind them the taller peaks of the northern mountains far in the distance, hazy with heat and topped by clouds. A moon ago she would not have had the strength or fortitude to make this climb and she feels a sense of deep satisfaction.

Oberyn always looks princely but here, hands on hips at the top of a hill, he looks lord of all he surveys.

"Thank you for bringing me here," she says, talking about the hill, but meaning the whole of Dorne.

"Thank you for coming with me," he says, and kisses her cheek, and she knows he has caught the true meaning of her words.

They find a seat on a low slab of rock and her body slumps in tiredness.

"This is the highest hill I have ever climbed," she says. "The hills near Winterfell were too dangerous for a child to clamber up."

"There is a tall mountain near the furthest edges of Essos so tall its top is peaked with snow, even though it sits in the middle of scorching sands," he says, folding his arms over his knees. "The boys who grow up in its shadows have a ritual: they climb the mountain alone to become men, bringing back a particular pink stone from the very top, having traversed across precarious ledges and dangerous peaks."

"Did you see it on your travels?" she asks, because people have made oblique references to his youthful voyages, although he has mentioned it little himself. "Did you climb the mountain?" she asks too, already knowing the answer.

"I never made it to the top, but I almost lost my toes from the cold," he lifts his boots up. "A witch found me and dragged me back to her hut to heal me. I cleared many acres of her forest to repay her, left her with a stack of wood twice her height." He sighs and rubs his chin, hand rasping across the short hairs. "I do not often talk about my time abroad."

"How long were you away from Dorne?" she asks, turning to watch his face.

"Many years. I was distraught after dear Elia died." He closes his eyes in pain. "I sold my sword, and slew men for gold; I studied with maesters, learning about poisons and healing and the body; I sailed the seas with pirates; I took dozens of lovers and sired children who I abandoned; I learnt magic and the dark arts, some of which I wish I had never touched. I admit that I almost lost myself there, Sansa, that I almost did not come back. But in the end something made me return to Dorne and my brother welcomed me with open arms and a furious countenance, making me swear I would never desert him again, and then I met Ellaria and she persuaded me to round up my first four daughters and find meaning through fatherhood."

He takes her hand. "I am glad that I returned from Essos in time to save you," he says, and she leans over and kisses him on the cheek, rests her head against his firm shoulder.

After resting, they make their way slowly down the hills, careful with the horses that are bred more for speed than hilly trekking. Grey and stormy clouds have appeared and they shelter in a cave when the rains come fast and heavy. She and Oberyn stand by the mouth of the cave, letting the cool air brush against their bodies, stretching their hands out to catch water from the curtain of rain. He seems excited as he explains that it has been three years since the last deluge. To Sansa, who grew up in the wetter north, the rains seem only familiar.

They make beds further back inside the large cave and Daemon builds a fire and then they sit and wait for the evening, yet she is not bored because soon the two men start to dare each other to perform various feats of physical agility - handstands, careful cartwheels, juggling acts - that she watches mirthfully, thinking that men are just like boastful boys sometimes. The horses who are inside the cave too do not seem to know what to make of their leaping riders and bray their confusion, making Sansa giggle.

Over dinner Daemon sings a song his mother used to sing to him, about the Rhoynar soldiers who fled with Nymeria and the comely wives they took in their new land. She lies back on Oberyn as she listens, as he feeds her cheeses and dates from his plate, feeling drowsy and indolent. She curls up next to him when they sleep near the fire, waiting until she feels his arms reach around her before she drifts into slumber.

Two days later she understands Oberyn's earlier excitement about the rains when they leave the rocky lands again for the dry plains which have suddenly bloomed to life, a carpet of yellow and pink flowers as far as the eye can see. Sansa feels her chin tremble with the beauty of the scene while Oberyn looks like a proud boy who has made a marvellous trick appear. They dismount and leave their horses with Ser Daemon and venture out into the meadow. It is dizzying to walk through, as if they are moving through a sea of flowers and not a landscape of sand, and Sansa cannot help but break into a gleeful run, the soft petals of the flowers brushing past her ankles. She spins round, laughing, and looks back at Oberyn who is watching her, as he always is.

He strides towards her through the flowers and she feels breathless.

"If I were a painter," he says, "I would paint you right here in this meadow, your cheeks flushed, shoulders pink with the sun, your smile-" He reaches out his hands to hold her face. His eyes are very dark, and his mouth-

"May I kiss you?" he murmurs.

"Yes," she says, and tips her face up towards him.

His lips are firm, his tongue hot, and he sucks and bites on her lips so carefully. One of his hands strokes the back of her neck and makes her shiver. She presses herself against him and feels the firmness of his body, the heat. He smells like the dry plains, he tastes like something new and she feels hungry for him, aching. His hands fall to her waist and clutch her tightly. She pulls back for air and stares at him as he swipes his tongue across his lips, tasting her, she thinks.

"I would paint you now," he murmurs, brushing a thumb across her lips, "well-kissed and glowing like a sunset."

The weeks, moons, of his touches have inflamed her. She lifts up on her heels and kisses him again, reaching her arms around him as he strokes his hands through her hair.

The sun is so bright when she pulls back that she can see every little scar and nick on his skin, the wrinkles of age by his eyes and mouth. He is so very dear to her, this prince, this saviour of hers. He dips down to kiss her again, holding her to him desperately as if she is ever planning on leaving him.

Eventually they part, sun-hot and rumpled, and he takes her hand and leads her back across the meadow.

When they return to their horses, Daemon has already prepared them to move out swiftly, and Oberyn lifts her onto his own horse in front of him, like he cannot bear to be parted for her for even the time of the ride, and she finds herself both thankful and wroth with him, for sitting between his legs, his hips, with one of his arms firmly about her, is driving her to madness.

She does not even notice the landscape they pass, nor how long their journey takes, until they arrive at the sudden shock of green that heralds an oasis hidden in the sand dunes.

Oberyn jumps down from his horse and lifts her from it. They stand and stare at each other, not even a handspan apart.

"Should you like to swim, my lady?" he asks her, finally, his chest heaving with breath.

"Yes," she says, without turning to look at the water.

"I shall prepare the tent and give you your privacy," he says, although she wishes he wouldn't, loathe to be away from him as he stalks off to make their night's lodgings.

She peels off her dress and shift immediately as if she is a slattern, and strides naked into the oasis, dipping under its surface as if the cool waters could help soothe her inflamed desires. She lies on her back and stares at the sky. It is not yet evening and the sun still blinds her. She closes her eyes and floats and dreams and trembles, her body sending out ripples into the water.

She gets out of the water and dries herself with her shift and then puts on her light silk dress with only her smallclothes underneath, feeling daring, wanting Oberyn to look at her with lust in his eyes. He does; when she nears the open tent with its two colourful fabric walls, its floor a carpet of silk atop the mattress of the oasis grasses; and makes a space for her beside him.

Daemon is elsewhere with the horses but she and Oberyn still sit politely on the edge of the tent, drinking wine and grazing on fruit, and pretending they are not staring at one another hungrily.

Finally, when the light begins to shift to the pinks and golds of sunset, he takes her cup from her and sets it down, and then tugs her to him. He kisses her and she flings her arms around his neck, and then clambers into his lap, breathless and wanting.

He clutches at her back, sweeps his fingers through her hair, moulds his hands around her hips, the silk between them so very thin.

"Will you lay with me, Sansa?" he asks, between kisses to her mouth, her cheek, her neck.

"Yes, Oberyn," she says, and then he lays her down and peels her dress from her, mouthing and sucking at each new patch of skin uncovered, and she is gasping and squirming and trying to pull his body down over hers.

He kisses her belly and looks up at her, his breath just as short as hers, and she cards her fingers through his hair. He gives her a wicked grin and then moves his mouth between her legs, shouldering her thighs apart, and she gasps a high moan, head falling to the side to glimpse the colours of the sunset before her eyes close in pleasure.

 

*

 

Other men might say that an experienced woman is the best lover, and from his time with Ellaria he would not argue against that. And yet, Oberyn has always secretly enjoyed laying with maidens, initiating them into new pleasures; the looks on their faces, their sounds, the way their bodies tremble with excitement.

He had not thought he would make it to the oasis in time, he thought he might stop his horse and ravish Sansa in the sand dunes, so inflamed he was for her.

She tastes like salt and sour sweetness and he works his tongue into her, sucks at her, brings up a hand to use his thumb and fingers. She peaks once, twice, making the loveliest sounds and bringing an answering groan from his throat as he tries not to rub himself against the ground and save himself for her.

He tugs off his remaining clothes and moves up her body to take her mouth, and she sucks at his lips like she is starving for him.

She has made him wanton for her, desperate, and he tries to settle his racing heart as he uses his fingers carefully to prepare her, and kisses along her neck and shoulders, dipping down to suck the tips of her breasts, feels his hips move carelessly against her. She opens her legs wide, draws him to her and he holds her face in his hands, watching her darkened eyes, breathing in her breath, as he takes her slowly, bending to kiss a tear that falls down her cheek.

Slow, slow, he thinks, watching her teeth bite her lip, and then sucking at the red mark. He murmurs to her, sweet words, heated words, and listens to her answers, feels her body welcoming him in, opening to him.

 

They do not sleep until dawn appears on the horizon, bodies replete and aching, clinging to one another even in repose. He wakes finally mid-morning, and stands and stretches, reluctantly leaves her to make water and find breakfast, covering her well-loved body with his robe and a silk sheet.

He tries not to smile, to hide his happy satisfaction, as he meets Daemon by the water of the oasis, but fails. Daemon says nothing but slaps him on the shoulder with twinkling eyes.

Oberyn only lasts a few moments before he returns to the tent with his arms full of food and a jug of water, and he settles down next to her to watch her and wait for hours if need be for her to wake.

When she finally opens her eyes she looks at him with a shy, blissful smile, and he cannot help but kiss her and hold her, forgetting the food entirely until her stomach grumbles with hunger and he parts from her.

"You are well?" he asks, as he watches her eat fruit and drink her fill of lemon water. Every little movement of hers inflames him, every twitch of her mouth and movement of her wrist pushing back her heavy curtain of hair that he has tangled to wildness last night.

"I am," she says, cheeks pinking, "and happy, aching." She bites her lip and he stifles a groan, tries to hide the feeling of pride that rises within him but from the tilt of her head knows he fails.

"This feels like a happy dream," she says later; later after he has carefully brushed her hair, cleaned her in the oasis, carried her back to their tent to ravish once more; later as she is lying naked and sated in his arms.

"If you are dreaming, my love, then so am I," he murmurs, and she hides her face in his neck and he holds her tightly to him.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think!
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and a rebloggable graphic for this fic is [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes)
> 
> I feel like I should maybe apologise for the misadvertising of the 'slow burn' tag but I just couldn't keep them apart any longer!
> 
> The next chapter will be the last long one, I think, and then there'll be a shorter epilogue after that. Also Ellaria will be making her appearance next chapter...


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

They stay at the oasis for two more days and spend most of that time in the tent and the water and sometimes out under the stars, loving one another, sharing secrets, exploring each other's bodies; until their lack of food supplies force them to travel onwards.

They ride alongside the deep sands and shelter in caves and in the hollows of giant sand dunes; they travel towards the river, and fish in its rushing waters, pluck fruit from the wild fruit trees near its banks; they clamber up rocky hills to see giant bones from the beasts who used to live here in the age of heroes, and the ochre handprints of lost peoples. By the fire at night, Daemon tells her songs about Dorne that fill her dreams, of the Marches and the Red Mountains, of Nymeria who made Mors Martell the prince of Dorne, and of the orphans of the Greenblood.

She shares a few of Nan's tales with him too, pretending that it was a septa who told her about the Night's King and his frozen lady, and of the direwolves rumoured to roam below the Wall. Then she dreams of Lady running happily across the sands of Dorne, hunting small animals in the dunes, snatching birds from the trees, and wakes with tears in her eyes, held tightly in Oberyn's sleeping arms. She is too young to have felt so many losses, she sometimes thinks, but this dry land of endless sand makes her feel younger still, comforts her with her insignificance. She is but a pale girl far from home here, not a woman who holds the fate of an ancient country in her hands, or between her legs.

They turn back towards Sunspear, Oberyn eager to see his daughters again and Sansa eager to lie in a comfortable bed and have a proper bath. On the way, they meet old friends of Oberyn, Morra and Wylla, two women companions who own a large farm and orchard in the shade near a large rocky outcrop that makes the land habitable for plants. He met them during his youthful travels, he tells her, they had saved him from sun sickness when his horse went lame as he crossed the sands, and then he stayed with them for some moons, tending to their orchard in thanks.

He leaps down from his horse when they arrive and almost lifts the two old women up with the enthusiasm of his hugs.

"This is Lyra," he says to them, "my paramour. And you know Daemon," he adds, offhandedly.

"We do," says Morra, her dark eyes twinkling, "but surely he is even more handsome than the last time we met him."

Oberyn scoffs and Daemon kisses each women on their cheek. "He has replaced you as our favourite, did you not know?" Wylla says, and laughs with a high giggle.

The two women are wizened and brown from their time in the field, but still beautiful, and confident in themselves in a way that Sansa envies.

Morra is teasing Oberyn. "Stop looking jealous," she says, "for you have a far more beautiful woman of your own," she smiles at Sansa. "An uncommon shade," she says of her hair. "And skin so pale I fear Oberyn has kept you shut away from the world, as well he might do with your looks."

"I am from the north, my lady," Sansa says.

"I am not a lady," Morra says with a little smile, "but thank you for your courtesies. At least one of your company is polite," she says to Oberyn who rolls his eyes.

They are like mothers to him, or aunts, she thinks, fondly teasing him, and he seems to be more of a youth suddenly, like a boy wearing too large clothes, sullen and grumpy. She tries to hide her smile behind a hand but Oberyn sees it in her eyes.

"Do you laugh at me, my lady?" he asks, as he comes back from the horse carrying spices he has brought the two women.

"No," she says, and he brushes the stubble of his cheeks down her neck and shoulders until she squirms from his tickling and then he picks her up, laughing.

"I should carry my delicate northern flower out of the sun," he says to the women watching fondly, "for I fear it has turned her mad," and he takes her inside the small house.

Over dinner that night, Sansa listens eagerly to their stories, greedy to learn more about Oberyn in the years before she met him, all the years she did not know him, the years before she was even born.

Later she and Oberyn walk through the orchard, the stars so bright overhead, the cool night air scented with lemons. She looks up at him, as they rest by a large gnarled tree, and remembers standing before him before the heart tree in the godswood, a lifetime ago.

He must be thinking the same because he strokes a tender hand down her cheek and whispers, "I am so happy you agreed to come with me, so thankful, Sansa."

Not as happy, as lucky, as she is, she thinks, as he kisses her and holds her, and keeps her safe.

 

The next day a few hours into their journey, Oberyn decides to challenge her to a race and once they have fed and watered their horses, they thunder along, Sansa's horse with its lighter burden winning easily, although it is perhaps more that Oberyn is letting her win, and she laughs triumphantly as she gallops ahead along the beaten path, the wind whipping her scarf loose behind her like a banner.

Then two small figures up ahead make her slow her horse to a stop. A boy and a younger girl, hand in hand. They are wearing ragged clothes and look thin and worn, the boy bearing a bruise on his forehead.

Oberyn pulls to a stop beside her and jumps down. The children are frightened of him but do not seem to have the strength to flinch, their faces showing blank stares of hunger. Oberyn takes out his flask, drinks a sip to show it is not poisoned, and passes it towards the boy, making sure not to touch him. The boy gives it to the girl first and holds it so that she can drink, before he downs his own fill. Next Oberyn brings out some of the fruit they collected that morning, and the children feast on it warily, watching the three visitors as they do so.

Oberyn crouches down in the sand beside them.

"I am Prince Oberyn Martell, have you heard of me?" he asks.

The girl nods, feverishly chewing her orange while the boy looks uncertain.

"This is my paramour, Lyra Stone, and my good friend Ser Daemon Sand," he says, and Sansa waves gently, before getting down from her own horse.

"Where are you travelling to?" she asks, hoping a female presence might soothe them, but knowing that it may not, for mistreatment may come from either sex.

"Looking for a home," the girl says.

"What happened to your last home?" Sansa asks.

"We cannot go back there," the boy says.

Oberyn nods, his eyes sad and angry.

"Would you come with us to the orphanage at Sunspear?" he asks, "or should you like to live and work on a farm half a day's ride from here? She is kind, the farmer, and her female companion is kinder still. I know them well and would trust them to treat you both as you should be treated. But if you choose the orphanage you shall not have to work, you can learn and play alongside the other children.  What do you think? You may take some time to decide, we are in no rush," he says, standing up and stroking the nose of his horse who is nickering quietly.

"The farm," the boy says.

"What does the farmer grow?" the girl asks.

"They have orchards of lemon and olive, and they grow crops."

"I like lemons," the girl says in her little voice.

"So do I," Sansa says, crouching down and wishing she could hug this poor little darling.

"The farm it is then," says Oberyn. "Do you two know how to ride?"

"I do," says the boy, "and my sister can hold onto me."

"Good, may I help you up onto my horse? I will share a horse with my paramour and you shall take Storm, for that is his name," he tells the little girl who is staring up at the beast with nervous awe. She nods, and Oberyn lifts her carefully by the waist onto the horse which looks very large with her sitting upon it.

Then he bends the knee and tells her brother to use his shoulder as a step, and the boy clambers up behind his sister. Oberyn adjusts the saddle as Daemon gives the children more food and water.

They head back the way they came, Sansa feeling quite pleased to share Oberyn's horse and yet sad for the reason they must double up, and once they arrive they wait in the orchard while Oberyn takes the children inside to meet Morra and Wylla.

He reappears a little happier than before, his forehead less creased.

"We never got their names," Sansa says, as Oberyn returns to mount his own horse, so as not to tire out hers.

"They did not offer them," Oberyn says, "they were not ours to demand."

"They shall be happy here," Daemon says, "you were right to offer them the choice."

"The people who live out here near the deep sands are proud, even the littlest," Oberyn explains to Sansa, as they set off again towards the bare horizon. "The thought of a life without work would be strange to them, the thought of a city like Sunspear terrifying. What they do not know is that the work Morra and Wylla shall put them to will be more like play. They shall have a childhood here, and I shall make sure they go where they wish as adults."

The thought of the children, the memory of Bran and Rickon and Arya, stays with her throughout the next few days as they near Shandystone, and once they have arrived and are eating around the fire, after Daemon has caught three snakes and milked their venom while she watched nervously from behind Oberyn's back, she asks him about the orphanage.

"You can visit it when we return. The children shall be happy to hear your stories, and spend time in your company," Oberyn says, once he has described the large house and its garden, the septas who raise the children there; how he had found two of its number himself, stowed away on a ship from Essos.

"I should like that," Sansa says, thinking about the games and lessons she had loved as a child. It will be good to have an occupation besides pleasurable indolence.

 

That night when they lay together Oberyn shifts her on top of him to ride him, and he watches her fiercely, as if committing her to memory. I shall not leave you, she wants to tell him, but she cannot find the breath to as he sits up and clutches her to him.

The next morning when she wakes in the messy pile of bedding, Oberyn is sitting next to her, brooding.

"Good morrow, my love," he says, stroking her hair.

"Good morrow," she murmurs sleepily, and waits for him to share whatever it is that has troubled him as they have gotten closer to Sunspear.

He turns away and stares at the weathered mosaic wall.

"You should tell me now what form you wish our relationship to take back in Sunspear," he says, "if you wish this time abroad to be but a dalliance."

He does not look at her. She would not believe he cared for her, except for the weight of the moons they have shared, and for the mournful shape of his mouth as he forms these words. The tortures this man puts himself through! - he, who once spoke of himself as her murderer.

"Oberyn," she says, touching him on the arm and turning him towards her. "I wish to be yours, I wish to be your paramour in truth."

"Good," he says, allowing a smile to break across his face and then kissing her, "for truly I did not know how I was to give you up."

 

They arrive in Sunspear in the middle of the night and Oberyn smuggles her into the palace in her veil, lifting her from her horse and carrying her through the halls laughing, even though she is perfectly capable of walking. When they reach their rooms he throws her down on his bed. Breathless and giddy, she watches as he stalks up the bed towards her and her belly flutters as he meets her gaze and holds it.

She wakes late the next morning; sore from the travelling, and the ravishing.

Oberyn is busy with his other responsibilities now that they are not travelling alone, so after breakfast she picks up the small embroidered panel she had started in the weeks before they left. It was a northern tale she had been sewing, one that old Nan had told her, about a winter princess locked in a tower by her cruel father who tamed a clever crow that helped her escape and reunite with her brave lover. But she does not want to work on that now, she wants to sew something new. She removes the fabric from her hoop, folds it carefully and puts it aside.

Then she takes out some of the skeins of wool she had not been able to use for a northern landscape - the yellows and reds of the sand and earth of Dorne, the fresh green of the grass by the oasis, the yellow and pinks of the flowers in the meadow where Oberyn had kissed her. Her cheeks pink at just the thought of it, and it is thus the man in question finds her a few hours later, bent over her hoop with a dreamy smile on her face, the pads of her fingers sore in a familiar ache from the pricking of her needle.

"Should you like to visit the orphanage now?" he asks her, after he has looked at her embroidery and run a careful finger across the desert flowers without saying a word.

"I should," she says, gathering a veil for her hair. If she dyed her hair she would not be so remarkable, she knows, but she likes her hair, likes that it reminds her of the Tullys, and Oberyn likes it too, slides his fingers through it and says that it reminds him of the evening sun on the sandstone of Dorne, and of the silks his mother wore.

The orphanage is just as he said it would be - clean, and well-situated, with a garden and a courtyard busy with children playing. The septa who leads the orphanage gives them a tour, asking a few polite questions about Sansa's time in the motherhouse that she answers obliquely. The children are not just from Dorne, just as the people in Sunspear come from many other cities and lands too, and they are many different ages and personalities, from the brief observations Sansa makes; but all of them are united in being motherless and fatherless. Sansa is an orphan, though she does not think of herself so, being older than these children. Some of them chose new names for themselves when they arrived here, the septa had said, just like Sansa.

She watches a group of girls play a game of make believe in the corner of the courtyard, passing around a crown they have made from twigs and colourful twine, announcing themselves princesses and queens and great ladies, describing the feasts they will have when they are older; before they scramble to the tables inside to eat the food the septas have prepared, and peel their oranges with the casual motions of children accustomed to the rich fruits of this country. Some of the children are injured - missing eyes or legs or hands - but their fellow orphans do not seem to treat them any differently.

Sansa's own self-pity, her loss, feels mean and small here, when she knows that she has a palace and a prince to return to, when she knows that she spent more time with her family than many of these children ever did. She is touched deeply by their bravery and their youthful hopes for the future.

"I want to help," she says to Oberyn, as they make their journey back to the palace in the curtained carriage. "But I do not have any useful skills to teach smallfolk children who already have teachers for reading and writing, and other people to care for them."

"You can teach them to sew, and sing," he says, taking her hand and playing with her fingers. "You can tell them stories."

"What use are stories?" she sighs.

"All children like stories, did you not?"

She nods and leans into his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her back.

"A happy childhood should have songs and stories, not just lessons. And orphanages may be better here than in King's Landing but they are still run by imperfect septas, not the Mother herself, you can visit regularly and keep an eye on things, follow the children as they grow older and make sure they find the best positions for their skills and temperaments, and you may put the money I gave you to good use."

"Thank you," she says, and kisses his cheek.

Oberyn offers her moon tea that first evening back in Sunspear, which she takes gladly. Yet she has the quiet thought that one day she will not wish to take it, that she might like to bear this man's children, to be a mother. To have sons with his eyes and daughters with his wicked smile.

 

Sansa strives to spend more time with the Sand Snakes, to not cling to Oberyn so much, but she does not have the Sand Snakes' ease and they seem to always be sharing stories about Ellaria, though not on purpose she does not think, which cannot help but make her feel more inadequate. Oberyn's elder daughters are confident and have many friends, talk in clever codes and have passionate arguments. His younger daughters, when they are not visiting with their mother back in Hellholt, are too young to be friends with Sansa and she would not want them to think she was trying to be a mother to them either.

She watches the Sand Snakes train with Oberyn in the training ground, with spear and whip and knife, and both he and they offer to train her too but she refuses - she does not want to turn her body into a weapon, she does not want to do people harm.

When she watches Oberyn dance with a weapon it makes her want him, makes her cheeks flush and her thighs tremble; there is something about the danger of him that excites her. And he knows it too, he watches her slyly when he stalks away from a winning fight, his body lithe and powerful. One day she cannot bear to walk all the way to their rooms and pulls him into an antechamber so that he can take her against the wall, sucking at her neck until she has a bruise as large as a plum.

When she is not with Oberyn she misses him like she has missed no one else, she feels adrift. She tied her life to him when he took her away from Dorne, and now she has tied her heart to him too.

One night, after a long dinner where she sits on his lap and lets him feed her, dozes with her head on his shoulder and listens to him jape with Daemon and exchange clever riddles with Obara and Tyene, they lie in bed, skin glowing with perspiration, the moon shining her light through the open shutters, the air spiced by incense.

"I use you too much," she murmurs, and turns over to hide her face in his side, "I rely on you."

"I like to be used," he says, but then his voice turns serious. "I give you everything freely, gladly. I fear it is I who pines the most when we are apart."

She moves back from and studies his face.

"Truly," he says, clutching her waist. "You do not know the agonies I felt when I thought you did not return my love."

"I hear tales of Ellaria and I cannot help but think that she is twice the woman I may one day be," she admits.

Oberyn shakes his head and kisses her forehead. "You are both different," he says, "like the moon and the sun. She was my sun who I ranged across Westeros with, who I burned hot and bright with; and you are my moon, my companion for these twilight years," he smirks, and she sighs indulgently at him bringing jokes into such a sweet speech, "the one who I share my dreams with, my nights, my bed, who hides away with me from the cruelties of a world I sometimes tire of, who shows me Dorne in a new magical light."

"I should not like to wax and wane like the moon, my love for you will not waver thus."

"Nor mine," he says, and kisses her, "It is an imperfect comparison, forgive me for my poor rhetoric."

"You are forgiven," she murmurs, as his mouth finds her neck and his hands tug her legs around his hips, as he enters her and makes her gasp with the pleasant ache of making space for him inside of her.

The next morning she awakes a little after dawn to find that Oberyn has left her with a parchment and a present wrapped in a square of silk - a silver ring with the sickle of a moon etched in gems. The parchment is a poem that he must have written sometime in the night and in it he says that _he_ is the sun and she his moon, and the words are so wrought and sweet that it makes her cry and feel a familiar wave of deep gratitude that they have found their way to one another.

 

A few weeks later, the infamous Ellaria arrives at court, and Sansa can barely sleep for nerves. She knows that Oberyn loves her, she knows that she has his heart, but she worries that Ellaria will want to rekindle their relationship too, and Sansa does not know if she can share him as a lover, even though this is a selfish thought to want to tame a man like the Red Viper.

When Ellaria curtseys before her in Oberyn's solar, Sansa returns the greeting and feels her cheeks flush. Ellaria is dark and handsome like Oberyn, and nothing at all like Sansa. It is true what Oberyn has said about them being so different.

Ellaria observes her too and then smiles, kindly, and says, "It is a strange thing to meet your lover's last lover, is it not?"

"It is, my lady," Sansa admits, trying not to look at Oberyn for guidance even though he stands at her side should she need him.

"Please, call me Ellaria," she says.

"Then you must call me Lyra," she says, remembering only at the last minute to use the right name. Oberyn still uses her first name, although more often than not calls her by some sweet nickname instead, and others do not often address her by name, they call her _my lady_ instead.

"Shall we take a turn around the garden then, Lyra," Ellaria says, motioning her head towards the archway that leads outside. "And gossip about the many foibles of the Red Viper?"

Sansa nods, her cheeks twitching a little from nerves. 'Tis better to have this conversation now, to take a measure of Ellaria and face her bravely. Besides, Sansa thinks, as she turns back to see Oberyn looking nervous too, it is good to keep him on his toes.

"Has he woken you up with his snoring yet?" Ellaria asks, taking her arm as they enter the afternoon light of the garden.

"No, I have always been a heavy sleeper," Sansa says.

"And have you noticed how much like a boy he can be, proud and boastful, when he wins a game or a race?"

"He often lets me win," Sansa admits, and Ellaria's eyes roam across her face.

"Does he," Ellaria says, fondly.

They move over to a bench and sit down. Ellaria's dress shows a slit of her brown thigh and almost all of her back. Sansa does not wear northern dresses anymore, but neither does she wear the daring dresses of the Sand Snakes. She dresses often in blues and purples that would make her stand out next to the rest of court were she ever to attend.

Ellaria reaches up to pluck a waxy leaf from the tree and rub it between her fingertips.

"You should know that I do not love Oberyn like a lover any longer. I feel a great fondness for him, a friendship, a respect, a tenderness too. But the passion is gone, the desire, and it shall not return, of that I am certain. I am no rival to you, my lady, though how I could rival a beauty like you, I do not know," she smiles, and reaches out a hand to stroke a strand of Sansa's hair.

"I had worried about you visiting the palace," Sansa admits, "worried that a stranger to me will always have a piece of his heart, but now that you are here I realise that I know you already, that I have seen your face in the faces of your daughters, your mannerisms in them, your fierceness."

"Thank you," Ellaria says and takes her hand to squeeze. "My daughters have spoken of you too, you know. They have said that their father keeps a beautiful lady from a song in his rooms whose skin is too fair for the midday sun, and whose courtesies amaze them. I caught Loreza imitating your particular curtsey, and Dorea wishes to be just as fair as you at embroidery one day. It is good for them to meet a woman so different from those in Dorne, to not think they only have to follow my path."

Sansa does not say that she does not wish to supplant Ellaria in their affections because that is a ridiculous thought, for no one can take the place of a true mother in a daughter's heart. She feels Ellaria's motherhood now, in the kind way she treats her, and when she saw her play with her daughters earlier from a window onto a courtyard.

 _Mother_ , Sansa thinks suddenly of Catelyn, _how far I have travelled from you.  
_

"I am thinking of my own mother," Sansa says, "so long lost to me." Her throat is thick.

"I would comfort you but another dearly wishes to, I think," Ellaria says, placing an arm around her and motioning towards a frowning Oberyn striding towards them.

"We were talking of lost mothers, and motherhood," Ellaria says when he reaches them.

Oberyn strokes Sansa's hair and turns her face to look at him. He kisses her forehead.

"We have also been talking of your snoring," Sansa says.

Oberyn scoffs delightedly, "Lies."

Ellaria hums knowingly and Sansa smiles.

At dinner she watches them closely, Ellaria and Oberyn, and finds that they spoke the truth, there is nothing of romance between them, just a deep friendship, a shared love for their daughters. She enjoys watching Ellaria spar with Doran with words, and beat Oberyn at a game of Cyvasse, while Sansa weaves threads together into bracelets for the orphans at his feet, resting her head against his leg and letting the murmur of his voice sink her into a pleasant calm.

 

*

 

On the evening of Ellaria's return to court the two ex-lovers stand on a balcony under the shade of palms and potted orange trees, drinking thick Dornish wine and watching their daughters play skipping games in the courtyard with Sansa teaching Dorea embroidery in a shady corner.

"I have heard tell of Prince Oberyn's jewel," Ellaria says, leaning on the balcony "for this is what they call your Lyra Stone. I have heard that you guard her like the snake of your namesake and I see for myself that this is true."

He huffs a breath and folds his arms.

"She suits you, I think. You have always liked being a protector, you like to be needed. I think you like that she is only yours," she studies his face with the familiarity of a longtime lover. "You like being a father and a lover to her. You feel old now, I know," she says, prodding him in the chest with a finger, and then fingering a lock of greying hair. "You like that she is young, you see the world new through her eyes, do you not?"

He does not reply either way. Ellaria is the only one he would allow such presumptuous words.

"You like being older, wiser," she tilts her head. "Yet I was the elder by a few years when we first met, was I not, darling boy?"

"A man may have many true loves in his lifetime."

"I know, Oberyn," she says, kindly, "and a woman may too. But I think this girl shall stay the course, keep you spry in your dotage," she teases.

"Who knows what the fates may bring," he admits.

"A few more babes, maybe even with red hair, that is what I believe the cards would show."

"I like making children," he says defensively, thrilled at the thought of babes that look like he and Sansa.

"I know you do!" she laughs.

A servant passes carrying a tray of fruit and cakes which they take and eat, brushing the crumbs from their mouths, sucking the juices from sweet blood oranges.

"I mentioned the cards on purpose, you know," Ellaria then says, sly as ever.

"I know."

For it was not just poisons and dark magics that Oberyn learnt while travelling in Essos, he had also learnt cartomancy. He had liked the way the cards made him look towards the future, instead of gazing mournfully at the past, at the tragedies he was trying to run from, but when they showed him a future that terrified him he wished he had never drawn a single one. For one particular hand kept being set in front of him, even if it was not him who did the reading. The Maiden, and Death. It was stark, and unmistakable, and no matter how much he shuffled the pack, the reading was still the same - a maiden dear to him would die.

Was this one of the reasons why he chose Ellaria as a paramour, a woman who had not been a maiden when they met? If it was, it was only one of many reasons, chief of which had been the blazing love he felt for her from the first meeting. Was it the reason he trained his daughters so vigilantly, and was relieved when they grew older and became women? Perhaps.

"You were death, and she was the maiden," Ellaria muses. "You killed her and brought her back."

"I did," he says, and nods.

"You have beaten the gods at their own game."

He shakes his head. "It was the gods that gave me courage," he says.

"My bold boy," she says, touching his cheek before he playfully pulls his face away from her.

Obella has evidently won the skipping game as she crows loudly and draws their attention, and they watch Loreza angrily stamp her foot, and Sansa move to tidy the wool skeins that Dorea abandons to comfort her sister and team up for another game.

"I noticed that necklace she wears, the golden sun," Ellaria says, nodding at his paramour. "A different girl, another fragile girl, once wore that, did she not?"

He does not answer her, dipping his head down to rest his chin on his arms on the balcony edge.

"You could not save another," she says softly, "you could not keep another, so you stole her from right under their noses."

"I did not steal her."

"Did you not? Doran has told me an uncommonly romantic tale then."

"Doran should keep his mouth shut," Oberyn says, trying not to hide the proud smirk.

 

His mother once told him that important conversations must be had three times for them to stick true to the heart and he has found this to be broadly so. Thus, he is not surprised when Sansa talks to him again of her insecurities, a few days after Ellaria has left for Hellholt and Obara and Tyene have left for other lands to plot and scheme on Doran's orders.

"I am not enough," Sansa says, as she plays with a striped kitten in her lap. Her lower lip purses vulnerably, her eyes are large and liquid. She is so beautiful it makes his chest tight, so precious to him that he wants to keep her only to himself. _Covetous_ , Doran had said, maybe he is so. "I wanted to be useful for you, to repay you," she says.

" _Useful_ is not a term that should apply to romance. I love you, I treasure you, you make me glad. It is I who should worry about what I can do for you. I, who stole you away."

"I would gladly be stolen by you again, even if you were only a common man who took me to live in your small hut out in the deep sands."

"But a palace shall do?" he teases and she pushes him playfully.

"You have given me a second life," she says, turning serious, "You saw something in me at King's Landing, you knew, I think, that our hearts could be one. Oberyn, you have made the songs of my youth come true," she says through tears.

"Do not cry, I cannot bear to see you cry, unless they are tears of pleasure," he says, and pulls her onto his lap. "One day the singers will tell tales of us to our children and grandchildren, they shall tell them to Dorne," he swears softly, "of how I stole you and you stole my heart in turn."

She takes his hand and places it on her chest, stares up at him with the blue of the ocean he used to watch from the towers of Sunspear and dream of life to come; and he thinks that he will gladly spend decades trying to fathom her, trying to tease out all of the secrets inside of her, spend the rest of his life loving her.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think!
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes)
> 
> In the next, and final, chapter a familiar face from Sansa's past reappears, and the story shifts to an outsider pov...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shift in pov here...

 

 

It is warm when Jon arrives in Sunspear, but he knows that no warmth will ever be enough to rid his bones of the chill caught while fighting the war for the dawn in the deep north.

He has been king for quite some years now but has yet to visit his southron allies because he has been busy with the great task of rebuilding much of Westeros - requisitioning grain from the south to send north, wood from the north to send south for building, stone from the east and west to fix fallen keeps; aiding the soldiers who had fought so bravely beside him in returning to their families and peacetime occupations, paying for their funerals if they did not return alive; and so many marriages to arrange now that half the country's sons had gone, and so many maiden's hearts to break too, girls who had once wished, like his late cousin Sansa, to marry a prince or a great lord, and not the poorer cousin that was set before them instead.

Jon's wife and queen had been the one to urge him to travel to Dorne with a small retinue, to leave the squabbling of King's Landing for a few moons and enjoy some of the famed Dornish hospitality and he had finally agreed, and had left the Red Keep in her more-than-capable hands.

Alighting from his ship, he is met by Prince Oberyn, the brother of Prince Doran, and his handsome retinue dressed in yellows and oranges and golds. The Red Viper, as some still name him, is older now than he is in most of the famous stories, there is grey in his hair and beard, and his eyes crinkle heavily when he smiles, but the muscles in his arms look strong, and Jon notes that he is deceptively light on its feet like the best warriors should be.

The two men ride at the head of a long slow procession up from the harbour and through the Threefold Gate, and Jon wishes again that he had come alone with only one or two guards, ever uncomfortable with the trappings of kingship. Yet the smells and sounds and sights of Dorne work well to distract him from his self-indulgent woe, and he feels himself relaxing in the heat as he looks around eagerly, listening to Oberyn speak of the wonders of Sunspear.

As they enter through the last section of the gate, the prince adds, "I was sorry not to fight for you, Your Grace, in the war for the dawn."

Jon shakes his head. "The Dornish soldiers you sent were brave and did their country justice, my lord."

"My paramour was with child when the call came," Oberyn says, "she was young and it was her first babe and I could not leave her."

Jon has heard that Oberyn has a secret paramour who is rumoured to be from the north. The Red Viper's jewel they call her, though none know for certain what she even looks like, so fiercely the prince protects her. He is infatuated by her, they say, and Jon is curious if he shall meet this great beauty who has snared the infamous prince.

"How fares the queen, Your Grace?" Oberyn asks.

"She is well, and, please, call me Jon."

"Jon," Oberyn says and tilts his head with a smile. "Then you must call me Oberyn."

The queen would have made a whispered comment in Jon's ear within moments of meeting this prince, about how handsome he was, just to watch her husband colour. His wife had been thrilled to discover that he finds beauty in both sexes, but she accepts that he only wishes for the two of them to lay with one another, so that the waters of King's Landing are not muddied and for fear of the pain a bastard child might feel.

In Dorne they honour bastards just the same as those born on the right side of the blanket, and Jon has an idle thought about what it would have been like for him to grow up here instead of Winterfell, even though he turned out not to be a bastard after all thanks to his father's double marriage.

"I hear that your queen is fierce on the battlefield," Oberyn says.

"Aye, she is," Jon says, unable to stop himself smirking. To see her in a fight was a sight to behold, and Tormund had been forever mocking him for mooning over her.

"I would mention the queen's infamous beauty too, but I do not wish to anger you, Jon," Oberyn says slyly, and Jon scoffs.

"You would only be telling the truth. I know just how beautiful she is," he says. The beauty to his dour bleakness, he often thinks.

"And how fares your cousin, the Warden of the North?"

"Lord Stark is well. He is a fair Warden, fierce with a sword and bow yet kind, and well-loved by his people," he says, thinking that Rickon is also _wild_ but he shall not share this with anyone outside of the north. Rickon's young wife and his regent keep a firm hand on him, and he dresses like a Lord most of the time now and only rarely the furred creature he was when Jon had first seen him again after his years in the wilderness.

 

Jon is presented to Prince Doran in the grand throne room of the Tower of the Sun, and the usual diplomatic rituals are followed. Later, after he has taken a meal in the fine quarters given to him, and conferred with a few of his Kingsguard, he takes up Oberyn's invitation to see more of the palace.

He is shown grand courtyards and lush gardens, taken through rooms with glittering mosaicked walls and colourful glass roofs, past silken curtains draped across the particular arched doorways of Dorne to visit solars and halls, the great library that his friend Sam would die to visit, and the sept, an interior still unfamiliar to him even though he must now spend a necessary amount of time within the royal sept of the Red Keep.

Oberyn is good company, in part because as a prince he is closer to Jon in rank, and in part because of his own wit and calm confidence. He does not seem to be one of those men who feels they must prove themselves constantly to other men, with every conversation and gesture being a duel all of its own.

They have just crossed a courtyard already visited when Oberyn's face turns more serious. "Your Grace, Jon," he says, "I did not send so many invitations to you solely on my own, and Dorne's, behalf. There is someone who lives in the palace here in Sunspear, someone very dear to me, who you yourself once knew, and who wishes to become reacquainted with you."

Jon cannot think of whom he speaks.

"I only ask," Oberyn continues, as he leads Jon inside another building and up a set of wide stairs, "that you let them explain their story, and after that you may be as furious as you wish with me."

"I do not understand," Jon says, glancing back at his two Kingsguard who look equally baffled.

Oberyn leads him through a heavy set of doors opened by palace guards, and into what appears to be the private royal rooms. They walk towards the light spilling from a balcony curtained with gauzy silks, and a young boy with red hair comes charging into Oberyn's legs.

"Father!" the boy says, and clutches Oberyn, smiling up at him.

"Hello, my little snakeling," Oberyn says, ruffling the boy's hair.

Like the rest of Westeros, Jon had heard that the Red Viper had finally had a son, Maron Sand, after eight daughters, and Jon had also overheard some of the women of the court start plotting his marriage to one of their daughters. For even a bastard son of a prince of Dorne was a rare prospect for any noble girl now that the war had taken so many of the true sons of noble houses.

Jon had not pictured the boy with a shock of red hair that stands out against his dark skin though. His face has the look of his father but there are other features hidden there that Jon can't help but find oddly familiar.

"I am trying to escape the guards," the boy whispers loudly to his father.

Oberyn looks delighted. "You should hurry then, before they catch you," he whispers back and Maron races off, his bare feet slapping on the tiles.

"Maron!" a woman's voice calls from ahead of them, "do not run so fast!"

"I am only walking, Mama!" he shouts back, as a maid and two guards appear and hurry after him.

Oberyn laughs. "A spirited boy, just as wild as some of my daughters, despite his calm and gentle mother. I shall introduce him to you properly later when he has wearied from running about. But first, I shall leave you to meet my paramour alone, Jon," he says, and claps him on the shoulder, his face heavy with a meaning that Jon still does not understand.

Jon motions for his guards to stay outside, and parts the silks to enter the shaded balcony.

There, on a couch facing him, is a woman with the red hair of her son. She looks up and gasps, dropping her embroidery. Jon feels his legs go weak and staggers to the couch opposite her.

"Sansa!" he cries, "How-?"

"Jon!" his cousin exclaims happily, her eyes shimmering with tears, and then stands up to curtsey to him. "Your Grace," she says.

"Sansa, you don't need to bow- I don't-" he shakes his head and rubs his eyes as if the vision in front of him might change. His cousin had died a too-young maiden, all had said, and yet here she is now, a woman and a mother. "I thought you were dead," he says, his voice thick with emotion.

"It was a trick," Sansa says. "I took a poison that made me appear dead and Prince Oberyn smuggled me here to Dorne on my behalf. He did it for me, to save me from marriage to Tyrion, from the Lannisters who treated me cruelly."

"But all this time-?"

"I am known by everyone but the princes and princess Arianne as Lyra Stone," his cousin says. "It was not something I could tell you in a raven." She twists her hands in her lap, her eyes are shining with tears.

Jon moves closer, kneels at her feet and takes her hands. He looks at her, noticing all the ways she has aged and grown more beautiful - her hair a lighter red under this strong southron sun, the freckles on her cheeks and shoulders bared by the orange silk of her dress, the lines around her mouth that he has seen in other women who have become mothers, the blue of her eyes just as piercing as it always was.

"Sansa," he says, "I care not what happened these last years, in truth I only care that you are alive. It is a miracle," he says. He moves up to sit alongside her, his motions awkward because his legs are still weak from the shock. "Now, tell me all of what happened, all of your life here."

He listens as she describes her daring escape from King's Landing, her arrival here in Dorne, the trips Oberyn took her on and all the wonders she has seen of this country. She tells him too of her nightmares and her fears, her sorrow and the guilt she felt for giving up her name. He asks her about her children and watches her carefully as she describes her son and daughter, and how good Oberyn is as a father, and Jon is satisfied by the love he can see in her eyes.

"But he does not keep you here, cousin, you are not trapped? I feel I must ask," he says softly, holding her hands again.

"No," she shakes her head. "I like it here, I am safe, and loved. I know it is a selfish thing-"

"No," he says, "I wished, your parents wished, only for your happiness and safety, all else is words and wind."

She asks him about his own miraculous adventures, the shifting fortunes of his life, and he shares a few stories with her, the happier ones in which few people die, and he speaks of his queen and his love. Sansa is happy to hear of his life, not a morsel of judgement passes across her face as it once might have when she was young and untested in the ways of the world.

She calls for wine and food, and after draining half his cup for fortitude, he tells her of the last days of two persons dear to them both, two other Starks, whose stories are not widely known.

"Bran became the three-eyed crow," he says, and explains about Bran's greenseer visions and powers, about the weirwood trees and the twisting net of time. "He gave his life to save Westeros, he turned the tide of the battle against our enemy. You should be proud of him Sansa, as I am," he says.

She nods, tears falling down her cheeks and dropping into her lap.

"Arya lived until she fell in the war," he says, not wanting to tease her with false hope. "She had trained with the Faceless Men and she was a sight to behold on the battlefield." He places a hand on her arm as her breath shudders.

He does not know if he should hug this older version of his cousin but she solves his dilemma by wrapping her arms around him. She does not smell like she used to, he thinks, she smells like Dorne, like sand and heat and spice.

"Oh Jon," she says, pulling back and dabbing her tears with the back of her wrists just like he had seen Catelyn do once, when no one else was looking, though he shall not tell Sansa about this resemblance because he does not wish to upset her further. "Arya was so _young_ ," Sansa says.

"Aye," he says, and shakes his head, rubs his beard with his hand. "Many of the soldiers were, but they fought like men twice their age, ferocious and brave."

She looks down and rubs her finger along an embroidered golden sun on her dress. She is covered in Dornish symbols now, there is no hint of northern fashions or symbols, but perhaps it is just the dress she wears today, he is a little out of his depth with women's fashions.

"And Rickon? How does he fare? Does he blame me for what happened to father?" she asks, in a small voice.

"Sansa, he does not remember you, he does not remember any of us," he says. "And none of us blamed you. It was the Lannisters who caused our family such pain and I took vengeance on them on behalf of you and all of our family. They were judged and found wanting," he says, darkly.

He takes an orange from the tray and peels it, handing her half. She smiles and covers her mouth as she chews a whole segment, reminding him of her hunger for lemons as a child.

He shakes his head. "Can you believe where fortune has found us? Me, a king, and you-"

"-the mistress of a prince?" she says, teasingly.

He shakes his head, "I was not going to say that."

"He married me secretly, you know, Oberyn," she says delightedly, "It was when I was first with child, he was wracked with guilt for making me give birth to a bastard but I did not care either way, strange as that is. You see what a heathen the Dornish have turned me into," she says; smiling with the broad, happy smile of a woman, not the little girl he last saw. "I have become something new, just like you. I have taken a new name and a new family and I am happy. Selfishly happy, I think, because I did not have to bear the losses and pains you did fighting for Westeros."

"I fought so that people could be happy, so they could be sad, beautiful, and rotten, everything that people are. I fought so that people could _live_. You should not feel selfish for surviving, I know you carry your own hurts from King's Landing. To leave in the manner that you did, to give up everything..."

"Oberyn and his family have given me far more than I lost, I often think."

The sound of a woman singing in the gardens below drifts up to them. The palace here is far more pleasing to him than the Red Keep, there is a relaxedness, a languid confidence that there are no great host of enemies within or without the palace, as there still are in King's Landing despite Jon and the queen's best efforts.

"The both of us were resurrected, were we not?" Sansa muses. "A strange kinship to have, though my death was but a strange breathless sleep. I cannot explain how happy I was when I learnt that you still lived." She takes his hand and he squeezes it. "I had thought I was the last of the Starks, and then when I heard about Rickon ruling the North I was overcome," she says, closing her eyes. "I had made my decision to leave King's Landing and end the line of the Starks and I felt the weight of all our ancestors, our family, heavy on me. But then I discovered that my decision did not matter, that I was just a girl who could slip away and that no one would miss me."

"That is a bold lie, Sansa. I missed you. I know Arya missed you too."

A young boy's voice rings down the corridor. "Mama!" the little boy says, running towards them. Sansa catches him and he hugs her tightly, and then looks warily at Jon.

"This is the king, Maron," she says, stroking back his hair. "King Jon," she says, "first of his name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm."

Jon can feel his smile turn pained at the list of titles. 

"The king?" the boy asks, "the real one?" he looks between the two of them.

"Aye, I am he," Jon says, and the little boy scrambles down and bows to him, his eyes insolent in the way of young boys who believe themselves to be the king's of their own world.

"Your Grace," Maron says.

Jon tilts his head towards him and Maron studies him as if looking for something. The boy does not know yet that he is the first cousin once removed of the king.

"Do you know where your sister is, sweet boy?" Sansa asks her son. Maron nods. "Can you fetch her for me? I think she will be hungry now."

The boy races off down the corridor, his feet skidding on the smooth tiles.

"Maron has his father's wildness and bravery," Sansa says, as they watch him. "I shall not be able to keep him by my side in Sunspear or Dorne for long, and I fear my Jeyne is just the same," she adds, taking the black haired babe from the servant that approaches.

"When she was born I thought she looked a little like you, Jon," she says, as she rocks the babe from side to side. "Or Arya, with this dark hair and long face."

He leans across to look at her, feeling his heart clench in the way it does when he is close to any babe, with a longing and a sadness. "But she has your eyes," he says. "Catelyn's eyes."

Sansa dips her head and kisses her daughter's forehead. "And her father's widow's peak," she says, stroking her hair. "And his wicked smile."

He likes the way she looks when she talks about Oberyn, it lets him know that she is happy. As if called by her thoughts, the prince himself strides into view. He bows his head to Jon, and kisses Sansa who lifts her face towards him like he is the sun. Then he hoists up his laughing son and pretends to throw him over the balcony, to the boy's great delight.

"Can we fight, father?" Maron asks.

"Have you done well at your lessons this morning?" Oberyn asks.

The little boy nods solemnly.

"We can visit the training grounds later, when the sun is not at its peak. But for now, you might show your mother the juggling trick I taught you."

"Juggling!" Sansa says, her delight causing a smile to beam from Maron's face.

They watch as Maron fumbles with three balls, sticking out his tongue and frowning in concentration.

"Your son and your daughter, any of your children, will be welcome at court," Jon says to Sansa, and to Oberyn. "He might squire for me or one of my knights. I might make him my ward, if you should like."

Or my _heir_ , he thinks - watching the little boy with his red hair and proud chin dancing across the balcony - should the queen never conceive. Can he tear this child away from the warm delights of Dorne and bring him to the dangers of the Red Keep? He does not have to make any decisions yet, he supposes. Yet perhaps King's Landing, and Westeros, might do well with the son of the Red Viper one day, the son of a Stark with the fierce endurance of the north itself in her blood.

 

Later, after a long dinner of spiced meats that burn his tongue and thick wine that quenches his thirst, he finds his cousin on another balcony, basking in the last rays of the evening sun.

"I shall wake tomorrow thinking this but a dream," Jon says, "Sunspear is wonderful, and to see you again," he bites his lips, lest he start to weep. Kings should not cry so, yet his wife often tells him that a king who feels deeply is far better than one that does not. "It is a miracle to see you again."

"It is so wonderful to see you, Jon," she says, "I have been so proud to hear of how you are as a king, and yet not surprised, you were always honourable, good, worthy," she says. "He would have said so too," she says, not naming the man they both know she speaks of, lest they both become upset Jon thinks.

He stares out at the burnished rooftops of the city, "You may always change your mind, Sansa," he says, "you may always change your mind about your name and your life," he stresses, turning to her. "There will always be a place for you at my court, a place in the North, and another home."

"I cannot imagine I would need a third life, cousin, but I thank you all the same for your offer." She leans over and kisses his cheek.

They rest their arms on the balcony edge, and the seriousness of the moment softens. "I am looking forward to seeing more of Dorne," he says, sweeping his hand across the horizon.

"Dorne is looking forward to meeting you," she says, "and I should warn you that Oberyn will find a way to challenge you to at least one duel while you are here," she says, rolling her eyes fondly.

"I shall do my best not to embarrass the North," he says and she laughs, and then turns to meet the prince who has arrived with two cups of wine.

"I shall to bed now," Jon says, politely waving the offer of wine away. "Thank you for a wonderful first day in Sunspear, I shall see you on the morrow."

Oberyn and Sansa bow their heads and Jon bends his, and leaves them; pausing on the threshold to look back at the couple silhouetted by the sunset, at his cousin who was once his sister, and the man who gave her a second life here in Dorne.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think! And thank you to everyone who has commented along the way :)
> 
> I hope the ending is satisfying, I thought it would be interesting to reunite Sansa with someone from her past, and to see a brief outsider pov of her and Oberyn. 
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166102810197/on-the-morning-of-sansa-starks-wedding-to-tyrion#notes)


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